- Person
- Robert Fogel
- Lived
- 1926–2013
- Field
- Economic history
- From
- American
The story
Robert Fogel was born in New York in 1926 to Jewish parents who had arrived penniless from Odessa four years earlier. Trained by Simon Kuznets, he became a leader of the “new economic history”, which tests historical claims with economic theory and carefully built data, and he made his name with controversial studies of railroads and slavery.
In 1981 he founded the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago to study how economic, demographic and biological processes interact over lifetimes and generations. Its largest project, Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death, took nearly a decade of preparation before the National Institutes of Health agreed to fund it. Fogel’s team linked military and pension records, census schedules, death certificates and public health records to follow nearly 40,000 Union Army soldiers from cradle to grave, describing each man’s life with thousands of variables. It allowed researchers to see how conditions in childhood and youth, including nutrition and disease, shaped health, work and survival decades later.
Fogel combined such records with long series of data on height and body size, which reflect how well people were fed while growing. He and his collaborators documented a dramatic transformation since the eighteenth century: people became much taller, heavier and longer-lived. Building on the work of the British physician Thomas McKeown, Fogel argued that much of the early fall in death rates came from better and more plentiful food, which made people stronger, more productive and more resistant to infection, which in turn raised incomes and allowed still better nutrition. He called this self-reinforcing cycle technophysio evolution and described it in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100.
His Nobel lecture in 1993 focused on these links between economic growth, population and physiology and their bearing on policy. The work helped establish that chronic malnutrition in early life has lasting costs and that improving nutrition is central to health and development, lessons that remain urgent in countries where many children are still undernourished.
Why it matters
Fogel’s research showed that ending chronic hunger, especially in childhood, was a main driver of the modern rise in health and life expectancy, guiding how researchers and policymakers think about nutrition and development.
About Robert Fogel
Son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa who brought hard data to history, rethinking railroads and slavery and tracing how better nutrition and health made people taller and longer-lived. Nobel 1993.
Sources
- Robert W. Fogel, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Robert Fogel Wikipedia
- Robert W. Fogel, 1926–2013 Business History Conference
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.