Robert Fogel
Encyclopedia
Robert William Fogel 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 and director of the Center for Population Economics
(CPE) 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.
, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, where he graduated from the Stuyvesant High School
in 1944. 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.
.
, (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 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."
(CPE) 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
." 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).
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North
Douglass North
Douglass Cecil North is an American economist known for his work in economic history. He is the co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences...
) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...
. He is now the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics
Center for Population Economics
The Center for Population Economics is a research center at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The work of the CPE is funded primarily by the U.S.'s National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health....
(CPE) at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
's Booth School of Business
Booth School of Business
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is a graduate business school located in Chicago, Illinois, at the University of Chicago. Formerly known as the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Chicago Booth is the second oldest business school in the U.S., the first such school...
. He is best known as a leading advocate of New economic history or cliometrics—the use of quantitative methods in history.
Life and career
Fogel was born in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, where he graduated from the Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School , commonly referred to as Stuy , is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. The school opened in 1904 on Manhattan's East Side and moved to a new building in Battery Park City in 1992. Stuyvesant is noted for its strong academic...
in 1944. He attended Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
where he majored in history
Cornell University Department of History
|- valign="top" ! style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | College | style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Arts and Sciences |- valign="top" ! style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Department Chair | style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Barry Strauss...
, 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
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
. He later rejected communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
and attended Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
where he obtained an MA in 1958. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
in 1964. Fogel has taught at Johns Hopkins (1958–1959), the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
(1960–1965 and 1968–1975), the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
(1964–1975 and 1981-), the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
, where he was visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions
Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions
The Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions was established on 5 February 1944 from a sum of £44,000 received from the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1943 and augmented by a further £5,000 in 1946...
in 1975 and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
(1975–1981). Fogel married Enid Cassandra Morgan in 1949 and has two children.
Cliometrics and Railroads and American Economic Growth
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 cliometricsCliometrics
Cliometrics, sometimes called new economic history, or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history . It is a quantitative approach to economic history...
.
Slavery and Time on the Cross
Fogel's most famous and controversial work is Time on the CrossTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery is a book authored by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman-Content:Time on the Cross directly challenged the long-held conclusions that American slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and extremely harsh for...
, (1974) a two-volume quantitative study of American slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
co-written with Stanley Engerman
Stanley Engerman
Stanley Lewis Engerman is an economist and economic historian at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University. Engerman is known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel prize winning economist Robert Fogel...
. 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
Gang system
The gang system is a reference within slavery to a division of labor established on the plantation. It is the more brutal of two main types of labor systems. The other form, known as the Task System, was less harsh and allowed the slaves more autonomy than did the 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
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
) 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
Herbert Gutman
Herbert Gutman was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history.-Early life and education:...
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 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."
Recent work
Fogel is currently the director of the Center for Population EconomicsCenter for Population Economics
The Center for Population Economics is a research center at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The work of the CPE is funded primarily by the U.S.'s National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health....
(CPE) at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
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
Union Army
The Union Army was the land force that fought for the Union during the American Civil War. It was also known as the Federal Army, the U.S. Army, the Northern Army and the National Army...
veterans.
Much of Fogel's recent writing has incorporated the concept of technophysio evolution, a process that he describes as "the synergism
Synergism
In theology, synergism is the position of those who hold that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom...
between rapid technological change and the improvement in human physiology
Physiology
Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
." By using height
Height
Height is the measurement of vertical distance, but has two meanings in common use. It can either indicate how "tall" something is, or how "high up" it is. For example "The height of the building is 50 m" or "The height of the airplane is 10,000 m"...
as a proxy for health and general well-being, Fogel has observed dramatic improvements in health, body size, and mortality
Mortality rate
Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths in a population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time...
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).
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 EngermanStanley EngermanStanley Lewis Engerman is an economist and economic historian at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University. Engerman is known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel prize winning economist Robert Fogel...
) - 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 Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism Chicago: University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago PressThe University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, 2002 - 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.
- The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (co-written with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong), Cambridge University Press, New York 2011 ISBN 978-0-521-87975-0
External links
- Nobel prize autobiography
- Review of Fogel's "Escape from Hunger and Premature Death"
- Lance Davis review essay on Fogel's Railroads and American Economic Growth
- Thomas Weiss review essay on Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross
- http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2006/11/engerman_on_sla.htmlPodcast Interview with co-author Stanley EngermanStanley EngermanStanley Lewis Engerman is an economist and economic historian at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University. Engerman is known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel prize winning economist Robert Fogel...
on Time on the Cross] on EconTalk at Econlib - RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) updated information about Robert W. Fogel
- Feature article in The University of Chicago magazine
- IDEAS/RePEc