Karl Becker (statistician)

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Karl Becker

Karl Martin Ludwig Becker (born October 2, 1823 in Strohausen (Oldenburg) , † June 20, 1896 in Berlin ) was a German statistician and from 1872 director of the Imperial Statistical Office .

Life

Origin and early career

Becker was born as the son of the doctor Johann Christian Becker (August 19, 1794 - September 16, 1838) and Wilhelmine Catharine Becker (July 25, 1798 - April 1, 1872) in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg . He initially embarked on a military career and served as a graduate of the Oldenburg Military School (1838–1842) from 1842 as a lieutenant and first lieutenant in the 1st Oldenburg Infantry Regiment . With this association Becker took part in the campaigns of the German Confederation in 1848/49 against Denmark as part of the Schleswig-Holstein survey and received a brief command as a captain in the newly established Schleswig-Holstein army in the spring of 1850 .

After leaving these services, Becker received from the then Oldenburg Minister of the Interior , Karl von Berg, the suggestion to deal more closely with political science . Berg recognized the importance of official statistics for the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg at an early stage and saw in the mathematically gifted Becker a suitable personality for the management of a new statistical office to be created. Therefore, he assured Becker that after passing the exam he would be employed in the civil service in Oldenburg.

On Easter 1851 Becker began studying political science, economics and statistics at the University of Göttingen . For the second year of study he chose Berlin , where he also deepened his training by working in the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau . After the exams he returned to Oldenburg in the spring of 1853, where he spent almost two years making all the preparations for the establishment of a statistical office , which was inaugurated on January 29, 1855. Becker headed this office for a total of seventeen years, from 1856 with the official title of government assessor , from 1863 with that of a ministerial councilor .

During this activity Becker collected large amounts of data in periodic and occasional surveys, for example on apartments and households, birth rates and home conditions, denominations and the age structure of the population. He processed the data and the knowledge gained from it into memoranda, which was also used by the Oldenburg State Parliament to aid decision-making. Becker also gave impetus and assistance on issues of public or state interest. So he drew up the calculation plan for the restructuring of the state widow's, orphan's and life annuity fund from 1779 , without which the institution would not have been able to meet its payment obligations in the long term. Furthermore, by means of the blind census carried out following the population census of 1864, the responsible authorities provided information about the degree and age at the time of blindness for the first time and also specified the admission procedure for the population and trade censuses in 1855. When in 1870/71 the commission for the further development of the statistics of the Zollverein advised on the creation of uniform statistics for the empire, Becker was among the participants.

In Berlin

On July 23, 1872, Becker was appointed first director of the Imperial Statistical Office in Berlin . His successor in Oldenburg was Paul Kollmann . He proved himself to be a practitioner with an eye for the big picture and the ability, through additional checklists and centralized processing procedures, to significantly advance the still young statistical methodology. On July 20, 1879, the reform of the statistics of the movement of goods between the German customs area and the rest of the world was passed, which enabled an exact, immediate and monthly breakdown of the incoming and outgoing goods at all German customs border posts. This expanded Becker's work goals and the staffing of his agency again. The idea for this expansion of statistics, which is so important for the economy, came from the head of the Hessian Office for State Statistics August Fabricius , but it was Becker who tried out the associated new statistical techniques in his sphere of activity. After suffering a minor stroke, he retired on May 1, 1891.

Acting as editor and other activities

In addition to the organizational and managerial work, Becker also suggested extensive journalistic activities by the authorities under his leadership, the execution of which was almost entirely up to the executive board. For example, he founded the Statistical News from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg (a total of 13 issues), in which from 1857 to 1872 he wrote a large number of mostly shorter articles anonymously and - unfamiliar at the time - with text. He wrote other articles for the magazine for state and municipal administration of the Duchy of Oldenburg (9 vols., 1860–1869), which he partially co-edited , and in the statistics of the administration of justice in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg . The was demographics to its proper domain. Significant contributions to this were his work on the Oldenburg population movement between 1760 and 1870 (published in volumes IX and XI of the Statistical News ) such as the compilation of the Prussian mortality tables, calculated on the basis of mortality in the six years from 1859 to 1864, also with foreign mortality tables , which appeared in 1869 in the journal of the royal Prussian statistical bureau .

After the founding of the empire, Becker continued the work that had previously been done by the “Centralbureau des Zollverein”, such as the comprehensive processing of the respective state surveys for the areas of population movement, inland shipping, the coal and steel industry and foreign trade. As a result of the preparatory work of the commission for the further development of the statistics of the Zollverein , the cultivation and harvest statistics (since 1878), the statistics of wholesale prices (since 1879), the crime statistics (since 1882) and the statistics of the health insurance (from 1885) came as permanent Investigations for Becker's authority were added.

From the outset, the primary source work for all statistics was the statistics of the German Reich , for which 106 volumes were created under Becker's administration alone. From 1877 he published the monthly statistics of the German Reich and in 1880 the statistical yearbook for the German Reich as independent publications. Here, the data and material acquisition took on ever larger dimensions and the number of employees grew accordingly, as did the business areas. Despite this workload, Becker managed to organize and manage important projects himself, such as the first nationwide occupation and trade census of 1882, as well as the processing of separate memoranda, especially where they allowed a mathematical treatment. In 1874, Becker undertook his own research into the measurement of mortality, published in the same year in his report to the commission for the preparation of Reich Medical Statistics and another report for the international statistical congress in Budapest in 1874 Demands to be made of the population statistics for the calculation of mortality . However, these activities to expand international statistics remained the exception due to the priority of the imperial statistics.

End of life

From 1892 on, Becker lived in Oldenburg again. A cancer that was initially not recognized prompted him to take a spa treatment in Wiesbaden . The disease worsened there, however, and he moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg , where one of his sons practiced as a doctor. Becker died with him soon after and was buried in Oldenburg.

family

Becker had been married to Johanne Catherine Schröder (1826-1870), the daughter of the factory owner Caspar Wilhelm Schröder in Oldenburg, since May 8, 1859. Of the couple's three sons, Johann Christian Wilhelm (* 1860) became a naval officer and Heinrich (1865–1893) became a doctor.

Act

Becker mainly worked in the field of population statistics. Becker improved the organization of the statistical surveys and promoted the publication of results. In both offices he founded a number of series of publications, the Statistical News from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg , the monthly statistics of the German Empire (since 1873 as quarterly, since 1877 monthly) and the statistical yearbook for the German Empire . For his activities he was honored with honorary membership of numerous national and international statistical societies. From 1877 he was also an honorary doctor of the University of Tübingen .

Publications (selection)

  • Demands to be made of the population statistics for the calculation of life tables. Expert opinion on the question: What documents does the statistics have to obtain in order to obtain correct mortality tables? , Berlin: Publishing house of the Royal Statistical Bureau Berlin, 1874 ( Göttingen Digitization Center )
  • The organization of official statistics in the German Reich . Berlin: Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht. 1883
  • German mortality table, based on the mortality of the Reich population in the ten years 1871/72 to 1880/81, together with explanations and comparisons with other mortality tables : Published in: Monatshefte zur Statistik des Deutschen Reichs . 1887. H. XI. Page 1–65.
  • Our losses from migration . Published in: Schmoller's yearbook for legislation, administration and economics in the German Empire . 1887. Vol. 11. H. 3. Pages 1-24.
  • The annual fluctuations in the frequency of different population and moral statistical phenomena . Published in: Mayr's General Statistical Archive . 1892. Pages 22-55.
  • Status and movement of the population of the German Reich and foreign states in the years 1841 to 1886 . Published in: Statistics of the German Empire . NF Vol. 44, 1892.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Becker, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Becker, Karl Martin Ludwig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German statistician
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH Strohausen (Oldenburg)
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 1896
Place of death Berlin