A Dutch Pioneer of Demographic Forecasting

Abstract

On 10 June 1925, the young doctor Wiebols, who just four weeks before had publicly defended his PhD thesis on the future size of the population of the Netherlands at the Business School of Rotterdam (at present Erasmus University), received a letter from the distinguished Dutch statistician, Dr. J.H. van Zanten, Director of the Amsterdam Bureau of Statistics (ABvS). That letter has been lost, but we can deduce from Wiebols’responses of 17 June and 2 July, presented below, that Van Zanten had complimented him on his dissertation, while taking the opportunity to react to Wiebols’ criticisms of the quality of Dutch public statistics. Van Zanten invited Wiebols to specify what was lacking in the public statistics of the municipality of Amsterdam to facilitate forecasting of Amsterdam’s future population in line with the methodological directions given in his thesis. Wiebols had indicated the statistical conditions to be fulfilled for a further specification of a national forecast (Wiebols, 1925, pp. 110–127). His excursions into the possibilities of further elaboration of his method prompted Van Zanten to invite him to explore the forecasting possibilities of the public statistics of Amsterdam.