A joyful household in Depression-era New York
Robert William Fogel was born in New York City on July 1, 1926, four years after his parents and older brother emigrated from Odessa, then in the Soviet Union and now in Ukraine. The family was Jewish, and they arrived penniless. Just after Robert was born, his parents scraped together enough savings to open the first of several small businesses. Despite the Great Depression and modest means, he remembered, they created a joyful household and encouraged their sons to be optimistic about the future.
His brother, almost six years older, was his main intellectual influence. Robert remembered lying in bed, supposedly asleep, listening to his brother and college friends argue about the social and economic problems of the Depression. He went through New York’s public schools from 1932 to 1944, graduating from Stuyvesant High School, and credited the remarkably talented and dedicated teachers whom the Depression brought into the public schools with preparing him well for a life in science.
Cornell, communism and a change of mind
Fogel entered Cornell University intending to study physics and chemistry, but the widespread fear in the late 1940s that mass unemployment would return pushed him toward economics and history, and he graduated in 1948. At Cornell he led the campus branch of American Youth for Democracy, a communist organisation, and after graduating he spent about eight years as a professional organiser for the Communist Party. In that role he approved the expulsion of two future historians of slavery, Eugene Genovese and George Rawick.
In the 1950s he broke with communism, concluding that it was unscientific, and returned to university. In 1948, during the presidential campaign, he had met Enid Cassandra Morgan, a Sunday school teacher at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem who led Harlem youth for Henry Wallace. They married in 1949. As an interracial couple at a time of anti-miscegenation laws and widespread hostility, they faced real difficulties; in 1993 he called her, his wife of forty-five years, both his most confident supporter and his keenest critic.
Learning the art of measurement
Fogel took a master’s degree at Columbia University in 1960, studying with George Stigler, who taught him to move constantly between theory and evidence, and with the economic historian Carter Goodrich, whose questions about the Union Pacific Railroad became Fogel’s master’s thesis and first book. Goodrich suggested he continue with Simon Kuznets at Johns Hopkins University, the economist who had built the first estimates of US national income. Fogel received his PhD in 1963.
Kuznets, he wrote, was by far the most influential figure in his training. He taught that the central statistical problem in economics was not random error but systematic bias in the data, and he showed how to test whether conclusions held up when assumptions changed. Fogel resolved to measure the actual impact of particular technologies, policies and institutions on economic growth, using the most advanced mathematical and statistical methods available.
Did America need the railroads?
Fogel’s first major book, Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964), took on a belief almost everyone shared: that railroads were indispensable to nineteenth-century American growth. He asked a precise question. What would the economy of 1890 have looked like without railroads, relying instead on wagons, canals and rivers? Calculating the extra cost of moving farm goods, he estimated that the railroads’ contribution, the “social savings”, came to less than three per cent of national output, and would have been smaller still if canals and roads had been extended.
The conclusion was controversial, but the method was revolutionary. Fogel showed how economic theory, careful data and explicitly stated “counterfactual” comparisons could test historical claims that had previously rested on impressions. He became a leading figure in the new economic history, or cliometrics, and taught at the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago and Harvard. His colleague Deirdre McCloskey credited him with reuniting economics and history, and many American economic historians trace their academic lineage to him.
Slavery: a bitter controversy and a moral indictment
In Time on the Cross (1974), written with Stanley Engerman, Fogel used plantation records and other data to argue that American slavery was profitable and economically efficient for slaveholders, and that it would not have withered away on its own; it ended because of political decisions and the Civil War. The book’s portrayal of how enslaved people were treated, including claims about diet and the frequency of whipping drawn from owners’ records, provoked a firestorm. Critics attacked both its evidence and its tone, and some wrongly took it as a defence of slavery.
Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds and answered his critics in Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989). There he set out a direct moral indictment, documenting the high infant mortality caused by overworking pregnant women and the brutal hierarchies enslaved people endured, and explained how a determined movement of abolitionists turned slavery, though profitable, into a moral and political crisis that ended it.
Food, height and the conquest of early death
In 1977 Martin Feldstein, the new president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, asked Fogel to direct a programme on the Development of the American Economy. Fogel and a committee that included Stanley Engerman and Claudia Goldin decided that the big questions, about saving, technological change, women’s entry into the labour force, fertility and mortality, needed new data on individual families and firms across generations. By linking census manuscripts, probate files, tax rolls, genealogies and other archives, researchers in the programme built more than fifty such data sets reaching from the late 1700s to the present, a resource that has supported scores of studies.
In 1981 Fogel returned to Chicago as Charles R. Walgreen Professor of American Institutions and founded the Center for Population Economics, devoted to how economic, demographic and biological processes interact over lifetimes and generations. His largest project, funded by the National Institutes of Health after nearly a decade of preparation, was called Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death. It linked military, pension, census and medical records to trace nearly 40,000 Union Army soldiers from birth to death, describing each man’s life with thousands of variables.
Using height and body size as measures of nutrition and health, Fogel and his colleagues documented a dramatic improvement in human bodies over the past three centuries. People in Europe and America grew taller and heavier and lived far longer, and much of the early decline in death rates, his research indicated, came from better and more plentiful food, which made people stronger, more productive and better able to resist disease, which in turn raised incomes further. He called this cycle “technophysio evolution” and described it in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 and, with co-authors, The Changing Body.
Why it matters today
Fogel’s work changed how scholars and policymakers think about health and development. It showed that chronic malnutrition in early life leaves lasting marks on health and working capacity, and that rising living standards and better nutrition were central to the great increase in life expectancy. In his Nobel lecture he drew out the bearing of these long-term processes on economic policy, including the economics of ageing and health care, and the Union Army records he assembled continue to support research on how early-life conditions shape disease and longevity.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him and Douglass North the 1993 prize for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change. It praised his painstaking criticism of his sources and noted his view that the lack of relevant data, more than the lack of relevant theory, is often the greater problem for researchers.
Jewish roots and later years
Fogel was the son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, part of the great wave of Jewish emigration from the former Russian Empire, and the Jewish Virtual Library describes him as a Jewish American economic historian. His own account of his upbringing stresses his parents’ hard work and their reverence for learning; he did not write about religious practice. His wife had been a Sunday school teacher in an Episcopal church, and his later book The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000) examined how religious revivals, especially evangelical ones, had driven American moral reform movements.
He worked to the end. At his death he remained an active member of Chicago’s economics department and business school and director of the Center for Population Economics, and his final book, Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics, honoured his teacher. He died on June 11, 2013, in Oak Lawn, Illinois, aged 86.
Legacy
Fogel insisted that history’s big claims be tested with numbers, and he spent decades building the data to do it, from railroad freight rates to the life histories of tens of thousands of soldiers. Some of his conclusions caused anguish and argument, but his methods became standard and his students filled the field.
His most lasting gift may be the story he uncovered about ordinary bodies: that for most of history people were too poorly fed to grow, work or resist disease as well as they could, and that the escape from hunger was one of the great achievements of the modern world, still unfinished in many countries today.
Sources & further reading
Robert W. Fogel, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Prize in Economics 1993, NobelPrize.org · Robert W. Fogel, 1926–2013, Business History Conference · Robert Fogel, Jewish Virtual Library · Robert Fogel, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.