Robert Fogel

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Robert William Fogel (born July 1, 1926) is an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He is best known as a leading advocate of cliometrics, a name for the use of quantitative methods in history.

Fogel was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, where he attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School. He went on to attend Cornell University where he majored in history with an economics minor and became president of the campus branch of American Youth for Democracy, a communist organization. After graduating with a BA in 1948, he became a professional organizer for the Communist Party. After rejecting communism, he earned his MA at Columbia University in 1960 and PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963. Fogel has taught at Johns Hopkins (1958-1959), the University of Rochester (1960-1965 and 1968-1975), the University of Chicago (1964-1975 and 1981-) and Harvard University (1975-1981). Fogel married Enid Cassandra Morgan in 1949 and has two children.

Fogel's first major study involving cliometrics was his 1964 book Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, in which Fogel tried to re-create using quantitative methods what the U.S. economy might have been like in 1890 had there been no railroads. Fogel's conclusion was that had there been no railroads in the 19th century, the U.S. economy in 1890 would have been only 25% smaller then it was in fact. For this reason, Fogel argued that the railroads as an engine of economic growth were overrated, and that much of U.S. economic expansion was in fact fueled by the building of canals. Fogel's conclusions created much controversy with many economists and historians questioning Fogel's research in this matter.

Fogel's most famous and controversial work is Time on the Cross a 1974 two-volume quantitative study of American slavery co-written with Stanley Engerman. In the book, Fogel and Engerman argued that slaves in the American South lived better than did many industrial workers in the North. Fogel based this analysis largely on plantation records and claimed that slaves worked less, were better fed and were whipped only occasionally. Time on the Cross created a fire-storm of controversy, and many mistakenly considered Fogel an apologist for slavery. In fact, Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds; he thought that on purely economic grounds, slavery was not unprofitable or inefficient as previous historians had argued, such as Ulrich B. Phillips. A survey of economic historians concludes that 48 % "agreed" and another 24 % "agreed with provisos" with Fogel and Engerman's argument that "slave agriculture was efficient compared with free agriculture." In addition, 23 % "agreed" and 35 % "agreed with provisos" with their argument that "the material (rather than psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers in the decades before the Civil War."

Fogel's continuing work includes recent papers on health care and Asian economies.

[edit] Work

The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case in Premature Enterprise, 1960.
Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, 1964.
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 volumes, 1974. (co-written with Stanley Engerman)
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, 2 volumes, 1989.
Economic Growth, Population Theory and Physiology: The Bearings of Long-Term Processes on the Making of Economic Policy, 1994.
The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 106 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2881-3.
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 189pp. ISBN 0-521-80878-2.

[edit] References

Conrad, Alfred H. & Meyer, John R. "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South" pages 95-130 from Journal of Political Economy, Volume 66, 1958.
David, Paul; Gutman, Herbert; Sutch, Richard; Temin, Peter; & Wright, Gavin Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Goldin, Claudia & Rockoff, Hugh (editors) Strategic Factors in the Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Parrish, Peter. Slavery: History and Historians, New York, Harper, 1989.
Whaples, Robert. "Where Is There Consensus among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions" pages 139-154 from Journal of Economic History, Volume 55, 1995.