Robert René Kuczynski

Who was Robert René Kuczynski?

Robert René Kuczynski was a German-based, Jewish economist and demographer and is said to be one of the founders of modern vital statistics. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg and Strasburg and made his doctoral dissertation in 1897. After it he worked for the United States Census Office and different German statistical offices. In 1926, Kuczynski was chairman of the Kuczynski Committee, which organized the petition for a referendum on the expropriation of the Princes. In 1933, after Hitler had come to power, Kuczynski left Germany and went with around 20,000 books to Great Britain. There he held lectures 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.

An obituary of his son Jürgen refers to Rene as a banker - and the family does seem to have been massively wealthy.