Read the interview with Andreas Schleicher here.

Wolfgang Lutz is one of the world’s leading demographers. Demographers usually help us understand how our populations evolve and what that means for our future. What Wolfgang has added to the field is understanding the difference that education makes to this. His work provides the scientific basis for numerically demonstrating the longer-term consequences of near-term investments in education.

The contribution people can make to society, both economically and socially, very much depends on the investment society makes in their education. Wolfgang pioneered the development and application of demographic methods for the estimation, reconstruction, and forecasting of educational attainment distributions. In doing so, he helped to connect the dots between better education, better jobs, and better lives in the long-run development of populations. For some, these connections might seem intuitive, but by putting numbers to them, Wolfgang helped to understand and quantify their implications, and that is important for public policy to invest scarce resources wisely in a better and more sustainable future.

The methods and datasets he has developed have opened the door to a better appreciation of the benefits of education for many areas, whether better health in populations, more sustainable and inclusive economic growth, or climate change. For example, he introduced education as a key dimension into the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Scenarios which are the foundation and tool to understand and project climate change mitigation and adaptation. The essential point that Wolfgang has been making is that the benefits of near-term investments in education evolve very slowly, but they evolve surely to result in a better long-term future for virtually all aspects of sustainable development.

This scientific breakthrough in demonstrating the benefits of investments in education is mentioned as the reason for receiving the highest accolade (Mindel Sheps Award) of the Population Association of America, the Laureate Award of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and numerous other national and international awards.

Born in Rome to a historian working in the Vatican archives, Wolfgang initially focused on classical languages and history. In 1972, his father gave him a copy of the “Limits to Growth” of the Club of Rome, telling him: “As a historian, I am helpless with this, but you can learn to find answers to these questions facing humanity”. Wolfgang rose to the challenge. He studied statistics and discovered quickly that the omission of education was a key shortcoming of the first global model of the “Limits to Growth”. After being elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, he explained in his inaugural article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the need for human capital data for assessing the relative effect of education in relation to other drivers of development. This led to the science-based conclusion that once things are viewed together, quality education remains the key determinant of long-term human well-being.

Prior to forecasting educational attainment distributions, Wolfgang showed how he was ahead of his time in demographic forecasting. In 1997, when most scientists spoke about the doubling of the world population, he challenged the assumptions and, in 2001, he pointed to the likely prospect of a peaking world population before the end of the century.

Wolfgang holds a PhD in Demography. At the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, he was for 25 years director of its World Population Program and currently serves as Deputy Director General for Science. He also directed the Vienna Institute of Demography, founded the Demography Department of the University of Vienna, and established the ‘Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital’. He is a member of six science academies (including US-NAS and TWAS) and among his over 300 publications there are 22 in Science, Nature, and PNAS.

And there is something that perhaps fewer people know about Wolfgang, and that is his generosity in spirit, his deep sense of public service, and his commitment to the next generation of researchers. He has not kept the datasets he established for himself or his Institute, but he made them available to the world as global public goods. And however, busy, he is always ready to listen, always ready to advise his colleagues, always responding to that extra email, and he does all of that always with a human heart.