A lot could have been done on that summer day in Wiesbaden in 1999. Drinking a cappuccino in the sun. Eating some pasta in peace on the terrace at the Italian restaurant. But Gert G. Wagner immediately dragged the reporter into the stuffy rooms of this statistics conference because he was once again concerned with the data. To get more precise numbers about people’s lives so that politicians can improve those lives. Gert G. Wagner has made a contribution to this data collection like hardly anyone in Germany.
How central information is to good politics is constantly becoming apparent. When the federal government cushioned the inflation shock by capping gas prices in 2022, it knew shockingly little about who exactly was consuming how much. The price cap threatened to help the millionaire in the villa more than the low-income family with three children. The economist Wagner has always been struck by how bad the data is for making decisions – and how little politicians do to change that.
In 1989 he started as a young researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin to do something completely different. He built up and expanded the still young Socio-Economic Panel (Soep). Every year, 30,000 people are surveyed about their lives: how they work, how much money they have, how they live, how their health is, how satisfied they are or what they think politically. This has created a huge treasure trove of data for countless research projects. Since the same people answer again and again, developments become clear.
“It is the second oldest longitudinal study of its kind in the world,” says C. Katharina Spieß. The economist now heads the Federal Institute for Population Research. At that time she was Gert Wagner’s first doctoral student. “He was incredibly innovative,” she says. “He reached for the stars and brought them down, at least partially. When he had his mind on something, he pushed for the result.” Bring Nobel Prize winner James Heckman onto the Soep advisory board? Nobody believed that. Wagner talked to him.
He headed Soep until 2011, then he became head of DIW during a crisis and remained on the board for a long time. As a university professor, he primarily researched the welfare state and the labor market. On that summer day in Wiesbaden in 1999, he made a passionate plea about how mass unemployment could be reduced through financial incentives. From 2014 onwards, he headed the Federal Government’s Social Advisory Board and sat on a pension reform commission. He neither called for pension cuts, as some market-liberal thugs do, nor did he nurture the social-romantic illusion that there is no need to change anything in the retirement system.
In football he was known for his hard shot
“Most employees would be fit enough to work longer,” he lectured to someone in the block in the canteen of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. But for this to happen, companies that ignore older people instead of retaining them with gentler and more stimulating jobs would have to change. The data question continued to bother him. He argued that the reduction in the top tax rate from the 1980s was based on incorrect figures. This has made the tax system unfair for average earners.
Gert Wagner was not a business nerd. He was interested in many specialist disciplines, but also completely different things, such as food and football. Anyone who played with him as a guest on the DIW team learned to fear his hard shot. If he missed the ball – as he often did – he would always shout: “There was a lot of beauty in that!” Just last week he emailed C. Katharina Spieß. He was a little under the weather, she should submit the joint paper. Now he died suddenly and unexpectedly, at only 71 years old.