Robert René ('René') Kuczynski (1876–1947) was a left-wing German economist and demographer and is said to be one of the founders of modern vital statistics.
His father Wilhelm was a successful banker; his mother Lucy (née Brandeis) a progressive thinker who grew up in Paris in exile among French and German intellectuals.
[1] René studied at the universities of Munich, Freiburg and Strasburg and completed his doctoral dissertation in 1897 under Lujo Brentano.
In 1933, after Hitler had come to power, Kuczynski left Germany and went with around 20,000 books (half of the large family library) to Great Britain.
His most noted work was in the 1930s when he published figures on the extent of the slave trade between Africa and the Americas over the preceding three centuries.