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Linda Martin
Professor, UH-Manoa Economics, 1979 - 1989
Linda Martin fled the snowy East Coast and arrived in Honolulu in February 1979. She joined the economics faculty as an assistant professor on a quarter-time basis and climbed the ranks in her ten years in Hawaii. Linda had completed her undergraduate work in mathematics at Harvard in 1970, and received a masters of public affairs (1972) and a Ph.D. in economics (1978) from Princeton University. Before heading west, she had a brief interlude on Capitol Hill, working for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Population.
Linda taught undergraduate and graduate economic demography, alternating in the latter with Andy Mason, who like Linda split his time between UH and the East-West Population Institute. She was especially grateful for Andy's friendship in her early days, as she faced the challenges of being a joint appointee and the only woman on the economics faculty at that time. Her proudest accomplishment for the department was attending the annual meeting of the American Economics Association in January 1981 and interviewing Sumner LaCroix, who later came for a visit and became a member of the department.
Sumner joined Larry Miller, Linda, and other economics faculty members who lived in high-rise condominiums along the Ala Wai Canal. Linda was cheap and did not own a car during her first few years in Hawaii. Instead, she frequently was seen in a muumuu and a helmet tearing up University Boulevard on her moped. In later years, she finally bought a car, which she sold to Jim Moncur when she left Hawaii in 1989, and as late as 1990, he was still speaking to her.
Spending the summer of 1971 in India had piqued Linda's interest in issues surrounding rapid population growth, in particular high fertility and high child mortality. Her early publications focused on these topics, which remained particularly salient in Southeast and South Asia well into the 1980s. But success in reducing population growth in East Asia raised questions about population aging and eventually population decline, and Linda was fascinated by the implications for labor force, living arrangements, and public policy. She had the good fortune to be one of the early scholars in this area and to author several articles that are still frequently cited, for example, "The Aging of Asia" (Journal of Gerontology, 1988), "Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Fiji, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines" (Demography, 1989), "Changing Intergenerational Family Relations in East Asia" (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1990) and "Population Aging Policies in East Asia and the United States" (Science, 1991).
Linda was particularly fascinated by Japan, and while at UH took four years of Japanese language classes. Besides being useful for her research, this effort also gave her an excuse to watch the nightly TV digests of the latest sumo tournament in Japan. Linda was a frequent visitor to Nihon University in Tokyo and in 1988 received a Fulbright research grant to facilitate her work there.
In 1989, Linda headed back to Washington, where she joined the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences as the director of its Committee on Population. The committee was set to undertake multiple major studies of the demography, sociology, and economics of sub-Saharan Africa, and Linda was eager to learn something about that poorest part of the world. In 1993, she went west again, but only to California, where she became a vice president of RAND, the policy research organization. Initially, she was in charge of the one third of RAND that focused on non-national security issues, namely health, education, labor and population, criminal justice, and civil justice. Later she was vice president for research development, a corporation-wide position.
From 1999 to 2004, Linda was president of the Population Council, which is headquartered in New York. With over 600 employees and 18 offices in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, the council is a nonprofit research organization that was founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller III. Its mission is to improve the well-being of current and future generations around the world by doing policy-relevant research in biomedicine, public health, and the social sciences.
In the fall of 2004, after 11 years on the management high wire, Linda returned to full-time research as a scholar-in-residence of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies in Washington. Besides advising on IOM projects, she does research on trends in health of older people in Asia and the United States with support from the National Institutes of Health. The motivating question is whether as we live longer, we are spending those extra years in good or bad health. A lapsed economist, Linda continues to publish regularly, primarily in journals of demography, gerontology, and public health. She was thrilled in 2002 to have her first (and likely only) paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, namely "Recent Trends in Disability and Functioning Among Older Adults in the United States." She attributes her ongoing productivity to carefully choosing collaborators who are younger and smarter than she is.
Linda has been active in several professional associations, and as of 2006, is chair-elect of the Section on Social, Economic, and Political Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She also currently is a member of the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Linda Martin
Washington, D.C.
March 2006
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