Joseph John Spengler (19 November 1902 – 2 January 1991) was an American economist, statistician, and historian of economic thought.
He graduated from the Piqua High School and initially studied journalism at college, but dropped out after his first year to become a crime reporter.
[4] A year later he returned to higher education, at first studying sociology and political science, but eventually gravitating to economics.
His interest in population studies and the demographic aspects of economics reflected in his doctoral dissertation, became a major focus of his research and writing throughout his career.
His first book, France Faces Depopulation, published in 1938, examined the cultural and political causes of France's pre-World War II population decline,[8] and one of his last major books was The Economics of Individual and Population Aging, published in 1980.