Gerd Bosbach

Gerd Bosbach    (mathematician)
Born	7 December 1953 Kuchenheim, Euskirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Nationality	German
Interests	Covid-19
German statistician who criticized the dramatization of Covid-19 in 2020.

Professor Gerd Bosbach is a German statistician and university lecturer who criticized the dramatization of Covid-19 in 2020.

Career

From 1999 to 2002 he was a professor at the Ansbach University of Applied Sciences, from 2002 to 2019 he was a professor of Statistics and Empirical economic and social research at the RheinAhrCampus of the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences in Remagen. He is regarded as a critic of the dramatization and instrumentalization of the demographic development of the population in Germany to increase the pension age.

Critic of postponement of the pension age

In 2014, he countered the thesis of ageing and the resulting forced postponement of the pension age limit and the reduction of pensions with the following arguments:

• In the last century, we have coped with a much larger demographic shift than is expected for the future. This was accompanied by a massive expansion of the welfare state, prosperity and at the same time a reduction in weekly, annual and lifetime working hours. The logic that higher life expectancy, more pensioners and a lower proportion of young people require social cuts, at least in retrospect, fails.
• A look at the population pyramids around the world shows that it is not the states with young populations that are wealthy, but those with older populations.
• In the demographic considerations, large alarming figures are often generated using statistical tricks: small annual changes are summarized over many decades; for 2060, a retirement age of 65 is usually assumed.
• Productivity developments would be completely excluded from demographic future considerations, as well as the reserves on the current labor market (unemployed, forced part-time work, silent reserve, etc.).
• The financing problem of pensions is not a consequence of the demographic factor, but of the distribution policy, which for years has placed more emphasis on the promotion of large assets and employers.
• The continuing austerity course in the education system makes the claims of fears a shortage of trained young workers, implausible.

 

A Document by Gerd Bosbach

Title	Document type	Subject(s)	Description
Document:Renowed German Mathematician and Professor of Statistics Slams Dramatization of Covid-19	webpage	COVID-19/Pandemic COVID-19/Panic	A statistical demolition of the assumptions underlying official models being used to manage the COVID-19 pandemic

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