| Chicago School | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 1, 1926 |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Economic history Cliometrics |
| Alma mater | Stuyvesant High School Cornell University Columbia University Johns Hopkins University |
Robert William Fogel (born July 1, 1926) is an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is now the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions[1] and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE)[2] at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as a leading advocate of New economic history or cliometrics—the use of quantitative methods in history.
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Fogel was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, where he graduated from the Stuyvesant High School in 1944.[3] He attended 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 graduation in 1948, he became a professional organizer for the Communist Party. He later rejected communism and attended Columbia University where he obtained an MA in 1958. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1964. 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-), the University of Cambridge, where he was visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions in 1975 and Harvard University (1975–1981). Fogel married Enid Cassandra Morgan in 1949 and has two children.
Fogel's first major study involving cliometrics was Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964). This tract sought to quantify the railroads' contribution to U.S. economic growth in the 19th century. Its argument and method were each rebuttals to a long line of non-numeric historical arguments that had ascribed much to railroads without rigorous reference to economic data. Fogel argued against these previous historical arguments to show that onset of the Railroad was not “the single most important technology” in history. Instead, Fogel hypothesized that the increase in GDP given by the railroads would have happened anyway had other technologies taken hold. Examining transportation costs for primary and secondary goods, Fogel compared the 1890 economy to a hypothetical 1890 economy in which transportation infrastructure was limited to wagons, canals and rivers. In his analysis, Fogel points out that the quantity of working farms may not have been as large without railroads since transportation from the farms to secondary cities would be more costly. Even with this consideration, the "social savings" Fogel found attributable to railroads was negligible - about 7% of 1890 GDP. He thus, proved his hypothesis and it therefore appears that substitute technology, such as a more extensive canal system, could have achieved comparable growth. The conclusion that railroads were not indispensable in economic development made a controversial name for cliometrics.
Fogel's most famous and controversial work is Time on the Cross, (1974) a two-volume quantitative study of American slavery co-written with Stanley Engerman. In the book, Fogel and Engerman argue that the system of slavery was profitable for slave owners because they organized plantation production "rationally" to maximize their profits. Due to economies of scale (the so called "gang system" of labor on cotton plantations), they argued, Southern slave farms were more productive, per unit of labor, than northern farms. The implications of this, Engerman and Fogel contended, is that slavery in the American South was not going away on its own (as it had in some historical instances such as ancient Rome) because, despite its exploitative nature, slavery was immensely profitable and productive for slave owners. This contradicted the argument of earlier Southern historians.
A portion of Time on the Cross focused on how slave owners treated their slaves. Engerman and Fogel argued that because slave owners approached slave production as a business enterprise, there were some limits on the amount of exploitation and oppression they inflicted on the slaves. According to Engerman and Fogel, 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 whipped only occasionally—although the authors were careful to state explicitly that slaves were still exploited in ways which were not captured by measures available from records. This portion of Time on the Cross created a firestorm of controversy, although it was not directly related to the central argument of the book—that Southern slave plantations were profitable for the slave owners and would not have disappeared in the absence of the Civil War. Some criticisms 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 such as Ulrich B. Phillips had argued.
Historian Herbert Gutman and others have rejected several of Fogel and Engerman conclusions task on variety of fronts. Gutman argued they relied on evidence from a single, unrepresentative plantation, and also noted the authors were extremely careless in their math, and often used the wrong measurement to estimate the harshness of slavery (for example, estimating the number of slaves whipped rather than how often each slave was whipped). Fogel and Engerman later acknowledged these criticisms in a later edition. In Slavery and the Numbers Game, Gutman argued that Fogel and Engerman also routinely ignored better, readily-available data. Gutman roundly criticized Fogel and Engerman on a host of other claims as well, including the lack of evidence for systematic and regular rewards and a failure to consider the effect public whipping would have on other slaves.
A survey of economic historians . 2009. 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." . 2009.
Fogel is currently the director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE)[2] at the University of Chicago and the principal investigator of the NIH-funded Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death project, which draws on observations from military pension records of over 35,000 Union Army veterans.
Much of Fogel's recent writing has incorporated the concept of technophysio evolution, a process that he describes as "the synergism between rapid technological change and the improvement in human physiology."[4] By using height as a proxy for health and general well-being, Fogel has observed dramatic improvements in health, body size, and mortality over the past 200 years. This phenomenon is examined more fully in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World and The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (both published by Cambridge University Press).
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