Louis Israel Dublin

Who was Louis Israel Dublin?

Louis Israel Dublin was a Jewish American statistician. As vice president and statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, he promoted progressive and socially useful insurance underwriting policies. As a scholar, Dublin was an important figure in the establishment of demography as a social-scientific discipline in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Dublin was interested in eugenics but as a Jew of recent immigrant extraction criticized eugenicists for equating biological superiority with Nordic origins.

Dublin was born in Kovno, Lithuania. He came to the U.S. in 1886 with his parents Max and Sarah. Dublin obtained his bachelor's in 1901 at City College of New York. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1904. He married Augusta Salik on April 5, 1908. Dublin taught at Yale as a lecturer in vital statistics, and in 1924 served as president of the American Statistical Association.

He died in Winter Park, Orange County, Florida at the age of 86