Background of the Heinz Grohmann Lecture

The Grohmann Lecture honors a scientist who, in their manifold activities for statistics – within and outside the German Statistical Society – has combined scientific theory and its application in practice in a rare and emphatic way and who, with their work, has initiated and influenced the political discussion in various fields. Fundamental for them was the insight that, in economics and society, policy-relevant scientific findings always presuppose a preoccupation with the respective historical background and the institutional framework as well as the objectives, values, and norms guiding the actors.

The Grohmann Lecture contains applied topics from the fields of economic, demographic and social statistics, especially those of particular economic or social importance. The spectrum is broad. It includes topics of family, education, and labor market policy, as well as those of housing, health, and social policy, to name just a few important fields, especially in an aging society. Specific topics could include international labor market comparisons (immigration, shortage of skilled workers) or the influence of consumer prices on the Hartz IV standard rates (limits of a statistical model). However, the range of topics also extends far into the issues raised by the Stiglitz Report: the statistical measurement of prosperity, especially to the extent that it cannot be expressed in monetary terms. This includes, for example, a well-founded recording and evaluation of household production, the subjective assessment of one’s own living situation in relation to that measured by income, the nonpecuniary effects of unemployment or illness, the availability of resources such as real property, etc. From all this, but also from completely different considerations, the question of a possibly necessary reorientation of the system of official statistics, indeed of the entire informational infrastructure, can be derived, whereby, however, the limitedness of resources and a possibly accompanying paradigm shift could also be addressed. All this, and ultimately topics such as the reputation of statistics in society, ethical norms, and legal issues of statistics, come into consideration as possible topics for Grohmann’s lecture.

Previous speakers of the Heinz Grohmann Lecture