We sat down with our 2024 Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate, Professor Wolfgang Lutz, to hear more about his work in demography.

Could you tell us more about what you do?

Wolfgang: My research over the decades really has been using this comprehensive systems analysis to try to understand what are the most important triggers — what is the most important adjustment screw in the big machinery of the world that will make life better for current and future generations. And again and again, education came up here, mostly education of girls, as a key trigger of so many good developments. 

And demography is a quantitative study of changing societies. It's not only how many people are alive and how many births are born, how many people die, and migration. These are sort of the three main factors. But what we developed with my colleagues here is also what we call multi-dimensional demography, that is looking beyond just the age pyramids and the age structure, but also looking at the changing educational composition.

What sparked your initial interest in education?

Wolfgang: I started out hating education. I mean, I had a traumatic experience in elementary school. [I was] disciplined, [I had] everything marked in red. When I was writing, I had a lot of spelling mistakes. So when I got a little more autonomous and at the age of 15, I became the editor of the student newspaper. I still have a copy of the first article I wrote, and it was called “Primary Education: a Crime on Children”. So I sometimes say I was not starting out [as] a friend of education.

It was really through this scientific statistical analysis, that over and over, I found that the cognitive enhancement and all the other positive aspects that follow — also in terms of social and emotional stability that follow — from good education are really the key to meeting so many challenges of our world and in moving societies in the direction of sustainable development.

It was statistical modeling that convinced me of the importance of education.

How does your demographic modeling help us better understand the world and inform policy decision-making?

Wolfgang: The composition of human populations changes very slowly and in a predictable way. And since policymaking — really we are designing the policies today to then be implemented in a few years and will have an impact on society and the economy even more years later, we need to do some forecasting, some projections: how the world will look when these new policies would be in place; and how these new policies can change the path, can change the scenario of the future. And this is what we are trying to do in quantitative terms.

What inspired you to make all your datasets publicly available? 

Wolfgang: In the corporate business world, it is sometimes an advantage that you keep your data secret, that you don't share them with the competitors, because it may give them an advantage. This is quite different in science, where the international scientific community really wants to enhance knowledge as a global public good. You want to share your data with everyone and you want everybody to — if they use the same data and the same statistical methods — to also reach the same results. And that is what makes science credible, and that I think is this unique strength [of] how science can help and contribute to make the world a better place.

Can you share with us how you plan to use the Yidan Prize project funds?

Wolfgang: I have proposed two projects that both follow up on the research that we've been doing over the past decades.

One is focusing on Africa because the human capital and education challenges are by far the biggest in the Africa region, not only in terms of formal education but also in terms of the quality of the education, that will have long-lasting consequences for the sustainable development outlook of the African continent. So I propose to establish together, with the University of Cape Town, a center for African human capital. Applying these methods in a much more detailed way to a set of African countries, and communicating this to African policymakers and development experts in the region to highlight and give more information about this crucial role of education in development.

The second is linked to some experiences in the Asian region — in low-lying Asian coastal zones — that are particularly affected by climate change or by sea level rise. And here, 20 years after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the idea is to have a memorial research station that shows how, again, education and investments in human capital are very powerful ways of strengthening adaptive capacity and resilience to these negative consequences of climate change.