Name Robert Kuczynski Nationality Germany | Fields Economist, Demographer Spouse Berta Kuczynski | |
Institutions Alma mater Universities of Berlin, Freiburg, Strasbourg and Munich Children Jurgen Kuczynski, Ursula Kuczynski, Barbara Kuczynski, Sabine Kuczynski, Brigitte Kuczynski, Renete Kuczynski Books Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Colonial Population, Western and Northern Europe Grandchildren Thomas Kuczynski, Maik Hamburger, Madeleine Kuczynski, Peter Kuczynski Similar People Jurgen Kuczynski, Ursula Kuczynski, Lujo Brentano, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht | ||
Robert René ('René') Kuczynski (1876–1947) was a German-based, Jewish economist and demographer and is said to be one of the founders of modern vital statistics. Jürgen Kuczynski was his son.
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Early life
His father Wilhelm was a banker. René studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg and Strasburg and made his doctoral dissertation in 1897.
Career
He worked for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1904 he became director of the Statistical Office in Elberfeld and in 1906 took the same position in Berlin -Schoneberg.
He studied rent and income in Berlin before the first World War and found that 600,000 people lived in flats which house five or more people per room.
In 1926, Kuczynski chaired the Kuczynski Committee, working with the German League for Human Rights, which organized the campaign for a referendum on the expropriation of the Prussian landed aristocracy during the Weimar Republic.
In 1928 he led the German delegation to the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
In 1933, after Hitler had come to power, Kuczynski left Germany and went with around 20,000 books (half of the large family library) to Great Britain. There he lectured at the London School of Economics and became later adviser for the British Colonial Office. His most noted work was in the 1930s when he published figures on the extent of the slave trade between Africa and the Americas over the preceding three centuries. His figure of 15 million slaves became widely used by other researchers, but is no longer thought to be correct.
Family
An obituary of his son Jürgen [1] refers to Rene as a banker - and the family does seem to have been massively wealthy. Eric Hobsbawm ("Interesting Times", p. 145) states that while Jürgen was a "charming and ever-hopeful economic historian", his family "owned the Grunewaldviertel" in Berlin and he was "probably the richest citizen of east Berlin", however there is no evidence for Hobsbawm's allegation and it appears to be apocryphal.
Kuczynski and wife Berta Gradenwitz had six children. Among them the GDR-economist Jürgen Kuczynski, Brigitte Kuczynski, and Ursula Kuczynski