Robert René Kuczynski

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Robert René Kuczynski (1876–1947) was a German economist and demographer who helped shape modern vital statistics. He was born on 12 August 1876 in Berlin and died on 25 November 1947 in Oxford.

Education and early career
- He studied at the universities of Munich, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Berlin, earning his doctorate in 1897 under Lujo Brentano.
- In 1899 he moved to the United States for work at the Census Bureau and later the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where he met figures like Eugene V. Debs.

Return to Germany and public work
- He came back to Germany in 1903 and became director of the Statistical Office in Elberfeld (1904) and then in Berlin-Schöneberg (1906).
- Kuczynski supported the Social Democratic Party and worked on housing and income studies in Berlin before World War I. He found that about 600,000 people lived in flats with five or more people per room.
- In 1926 he chaired the Kuczynski Committee with the German League for Human Rights, pushing for the expropriation of Prussian aristocracy during the Weimar Republic.
- In 1928 he led the German delegation to the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Exile and later career
- After Hitler came to power in 1933, Kuczynski left Germany with a large part of his library and moved to Britain.
- He lectured at the London School of Economics and later advised the British Colonial Office.
- He is best known for his work in the 1930s on the extent of the slave trade, publishing a figure of about 15 million enslaved Africans and their descendants. This estimate was influential but is not considered accurate today.

Family and legacy
- In 1903 he married Berta Gradenwitz. They had six children, including Jürgen Kuczynski (an economist in East Germany), Brigitte Kuczynski, Ursula Kuczynski (a Soviet spy and writer), and Renate, who wrote the first history of the PhD degree in England.

Kuczynski is remembered for helping create modern vital statistics and for his important work on social and economic questions in Germany and beyond.