IUSSP 2024 Laureate Ceremony in honour of Wolfgang Lutz Online, 6 June 2024
The IUSSP bestowed its 34th Laureate award to Wolfgang Lutz, Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, OeAW, University of Vienna) during a virtual ceremony that took place on 6 June 2024. The award recognizes Wolfgang Lutz for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of population sciences and the distinguished services he has rendered to the world community of population scientists and to IUSSP.
The ceremony was chaired by IUSSP President Shireen Jejeebhoy, and included a number of speakers who addressed various aspects of Wolfgang Lutz’s career and achievements: Joel E. Cohen (Rockefeller University & Columbia University), Raya Muttarak (University of Bologna), Tomas Sobotka (Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital), Alicia Adsera (Princeton University), Nyovani Madise (African Institute for Development Policy - AFIDEP), Leiwen Jiang (Asian Demographic Research Institute - ADRI), and Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi (Vienna Institute of Demography – VID & University of Tehran). They attested to Wolfgang Lutz’s many achievements as well as his important role as institution builder and mentor, and his contributions to supporting high quality demographic training and research across the globe and especially in Asia and Africa.
Wolfgang Lutz’s work has brought new insights into the understanding of human capital formation around the world. He innovatively applies the methods of multidimensional mathematical demography to estimate and forecast human populations stratified by educational attainment, age and sex. His modeling of data on education and human capital formation analyzes how improvements in education (especially the education of girls) contributes to sustainable development and will shape the structure of future societies and their ability to cope with challenges such as climate change.
His work has been recognized for its global policy relevance. He was appointed by the UN Secretary General to the Group of Independent Scientists to produce the quadrennial Global Sustainable Development Report and elected to six national academies of sciences.
Wolfgang Lutz served as IUSSP Secretary General and Treasurer (1998-2001), overseeing the relocation of the IUSSP Secretariat to Paris and setting up the IUSSP’s first website, as well as establishing the IUSSP’s Population and Environment Research Network (PERN), which continues to this day as an IUSSP virtual network.
After the presentations by colleagues and students, Wolfgang Lutz was given the opportunity to speak, providing insights into his early journey from the study of philosophy and theology to demography. He spoke of the teachers who impacted his work including Sam Preston, Etienne van de Walle, Richard Easterlin and Nathan Keyfitz and summarized what he saw as the singular contributions the field of demography has to make for policy and to many other fields, paraphrased below from the transcript of the webinar.
“As suggested by the word Demos, Demography is primarily focused on the macro level, the aggregate level of changing population size and structures (in plural!), but we also need to focus on the micro-foundations of demographic trends. Policymakers, however, expect demographers to look at the implications of the sum of micro-level life choices on aggregate, population-level changes. Demographers should take a multidimensional demographic approach that looks at multiple structures to produce projections that take into account not just age and sex – as is done by most national statistical offices – but also educational attainment, labor force participation, place of residence, etc., which make the discipline of demography and its models and forecasts much more relevant to the rest of the world.
Demographers should pay more attention to demographic theories that have predictive power. We can identify three such theories: One is Norman Rider’s notion of demographic metabolism, that societies change through intergenerational (cohort) replacement. This is a basic paradigm of how to view demographic change, providing a powerful analytical tool when brought together with multidimensional population mathematics, to forecast not just the size and age of a population but also changing compositions concerning all kinds of stable and relevant characteristics of people. Other theories with predictive power are the demographic transition and its irreversibility, and the demographic dividend predicting economic growth and increases in well-being when the proportion of productive people - assessed by age, education and labor force participation - increases over time.
Demographers have a lot to contribute to the rest of the world. He exhorted demographers to be a little more open to other disciplines and communities – the environmental change community, poverty research community, as well as the democracy and political science community – where demography can contribute much more than it currently does."
For more details on Wolfgang Lutz's accomplishments and contributions to the population field please read the letter of nomination.
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