L'argent, la vie, la mort : les recherches sociales de Louis-René Villermé sur la mortalité différentielle selon le revenu (1822-1830)

[摘要] Louis-René Villermé, by his computations in political economy performed under the aegis of the Royal Academy of Medicine, based on administrative data, overthrows a timeless and fundamental topos of universal culture (money is powerless against death). Villermé establishes instead the existence of a direct relationship between ease (hence money) and longevity, and, naturally, of an inverse relationship between this same ease and mortality. A deep cultural revolution is at stake here concerning the perception of the relationships between money, life and death. The paper raises afterwards the question of the reasons why these daring results of political arithmetic of the years 1825 have only been accepted with a certain reticence by the official depositaries of the strictly statistical tradition of the Académie Royale des Sciences, i.e. the jury for the prize of statistics Auget de Montyon, and principally its referee Coquebert de Montbret.

[学科分类] 数学（综合）

[关键词] political arithmetic;mortality;ease;longevity;statistics