Mystery of the Orient

A good mystery often begins with its main characters innocently pursuing a commonplace activity. In this instance, one of us (Goldman) was working on a study of trends in fertility and mortality in the Republic of Korea. To cope with some of the gaps in the data, men's and women's mortality statistics were compared with typical mortality patterns from other countries. It turned out that women's mortality rates for the years 1955 through 1975 conformed to a well-known pattern, whereas men's rates for those same years deviated from all well-known patterns. This mysterious anomaly set in motion some research that seems to have found the cause of the unusual mortality pattern, but has also turned up other interesting questions. In this article we will give a brief account of this work, pausing along the way t o describe some of the mathematical tools demographers use to study mortality.