Robert Fogel

Chicago School
Born	(1926-07-01) July 1, 1926 (age 85) New York City
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.

Life and career[link]

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.

[edit] 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 indispensable to the American economy. Examining the transportation of agricultural goods, Fogel compared the 1890 economy to a hypothetical 1890 economy in which transportation infrastructure was limited to wagons, canals, and natural waterways. Fogel points out that the absence of railroads would have substantially increased transportation costs from farms to primary markets, particularly in the Midwest, and changed the geographic location of agricultural production. Despite this consideration, the overall increase in transportation costs, i.e., the "social savings" attributable to railroads, was small - about 2.7% of 1890 GNP. The potential for substitute technologies, such as a more extensive canal system or improved roads, further lowers the importance of railroads. The conclusion that railroads were not indispensable to economic development made a controversial name for cliometrics.

[edit] Slavery and Time on the Cross

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. 

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences[link]

In 1993, Robert Fogel received, jointly with and Douglass C. North, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change". In his Nobel lecture^[4], titled "Economic growth, population theory, and physiology: the bearing of long-term processes on the making of economic policy", he emphasises his work done on the question of nutrition and economic growth.

Recent work[link]

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."^[5] 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).

Work[link]

• 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 Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 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

See also[link]

• List of economists
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates

References[link]

• Conrad, Alfred H.; Meyer, John R. (1958). "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South". Journal of Political Economy 66 (2): 95–130. DOI:10.1086/258020. 
• David, Paul; et al. (1976). Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502034-0. 
• Goldin, Claudia;Rockoff, Hugh [edd.] (1992). Strategic Factors in the Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-30112-5. 
• Parish, Peter (1989). Slavery: History and Historians. New York: Harper. ISBN 0-06-437001-1. 
• Whaples, Robert (1995). "Where Is There Consensus among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions". Journal of Economic History 55 (1): 139–154. DOI:10.1017/S0022050700040602. JSTOR 2123771. 

External links[link]

• 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
• Podcast Interview with co-author Stanley Engerman 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

Fogel is a surname and may refer to:

• Horace Fogel (1861 – 1928), American baseball manager
• Vladimir Fogel (1902 – 1929), Russian silent film actor
• Seymour Fogel (1911 – 1984), American artist
• David Fogel American criminologist and penologist
• Robert Fogel (born 1926), American economic historian and scientist
• Lawrence J. Fogel (1928 – 2007), pioneer in evolutionary computation
• Herbert Allan Fogel (born 1929), United States federal judge
• Davy Fogel (born 1945), British soldier
• Aaron Fogel (born 1947), American poet
• Daniel Mark Fogel (born 1948), former President of the University of Vermont
• Jeremy Fogel (born 1949), United States federal judge
• Silvio Fogel, Argentine football player
• Alice B. Fogel, American poet, writer, and professor
• David B. Fogel (born 1964), American computer scientist
• Eric Fogel (born 1969), American director, writer, producer and voice actor

See also[link]

• Fogle
• Vogel

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Robert Solow

Neo-Keynesian economics
Born	(1924-08-23) August 23, 1924 (age 87) Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	United States
Institution	MIT
Field	Macroeconomics
Alma mater	Harvard University
Influences	Wassily Leontief William Phillips Alvin Hansen Paul Samuelson
Influenced	George Akerlof Robert J. Gordon Joseph Stiglitz Jagdish Bhagwati
Contributions	Exogenous growth model
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1961) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1987) National Medal of Science (1999)
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Robert Merton Solow (born August 23, 1924) is an American economist particularly known for his work on the theory of economic growth that culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961) and the 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Biography[link]

Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He was well educated in the neighborhood public schools of New York City and excelled academically early in life.^[1] In September 1940, Solow went to Harvard College with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were in sociology and anthropology as well as elementary economics.

By the end of 1942, Solow left the university and joined the U.S. Army. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily, and later served in Italy during World War II until he was discharged in August 1945.^[1]

He returned to Harvard in 1945, and studied under Wassily Leontief. As his research assistant he produced the first set of capital-coefficients for the input-output model. Then he became interested in statistics and probability models. From 1949–50, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University to study statistics more intensively. During that year he was also working on his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory attempt to model changes in the size distribution of wage income using interacting Markov processes for employment-unemployment and wage rates.^[1]

In 1949, just before going off to Columbia he was offered and accepted an Assistant Professorship in the Economics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At M.I.T. he taught courses in statistics and econometrics. Solow’s interest gradually changed to Macroeconomics. For almost 40 years, Solow and Paul Samuelson worked together on many landmark theories: von Neumann growth theory (1953), Theory of capital (1956), linear programming (1958) and the Phillips Curve (1960).

Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (1961–62) and member of the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance (1968–70). His studies focused mainly in the fields of employment and growth policies, and the theory of capital.

In 1961 he won the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age forty. In 1979 he was president of that association.

In 1987, Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize for his analysis of economic growth.^[1]

In 1999, he received National Medal of Science.

Solow is Founder of the Cournot Foundation and Cournot Centre.

He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

In 2011, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Science from Tufts University.

Several of his students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize including Peter Diamond, Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof.

Economic contributions[link]

Solow's model of economic growth, often known as the Solow-Swan neo-classical growth model as the model was independently discovered by Trevor W. Swan and published in "The Economic Record" in 1956, allows the determinants of economic growth to be separated out into increases in inputs (labour and capital) and technical progress. Using his model, Solow calculated that about four-fifths of the growth in US output per worker was attributable to technical progress.

Bill Clinton awarding Solow the National Medal of Science in 1999.

Solow also was the first to develop a growth model with different vintages of capital.^[2] The idea behind Solow's vintage capital growth model is that new capital is more valuable than old (vintage) capital because new capital is produced through known technology. Within the confines of Solow's model, this known technology is assumed to be constantly improving. Consequently, the products of this technology (the new capital) are expected to be more productive as well as more valuable.^[2] Both Paul Romer and Robert Lucas, Jr. subsequently developed alternatives to Solow's neo-classical growth model.^[2]

Since Solow's initial work in the 1950s, many more sophisticated models of economic growth have been proposed, leading to varying conclusions about the causes of economic growth. In the 1980s efforts have focused on the role of technological progress in the economy, leading to the development of endogenous growth theory (or new growth theory). Today, economists use Solow's sources-of-growth accounting to estimate the separate effects on economic growth of technological change, capital, and labor.^[2]

Solow currently is an emeritus Institute Professor in the MIT economics department, and previously taught at Columbia University.

Quotations[link]

This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process.

• "Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers."
• "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."^[3]
• "Over the long term, places with strong, distinctive identities are more likely to prosper than places without them. Every place must identify its strongest most distinctive features and develop them or run the risk of being all things to all persons and nothing special to any...Livability is not a middle-class luxury. It is an economic imperative."
• "If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources."
• "There is no evidence that God ever intended the United States of America to have a higher per capita income than the rest of the world for eternity."^[4]
• "Every discussion among economists of the relatively slow growth of the British economy compared with the Continental economies ends up in a blaze of amateur sociology."^[5]

Publications[link]

• "A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth". Quarterly Journal of Economics (The MIT Press) 70 (1): 65–94. 1956. DOI:10.2307/1884513. JSTOR 1884513. 
• "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function". Review of Economics and Statistics (The MIT Press) 39 (3): 312–320. 1957. DOI:10.2307/1926047. JSTOR 1926047. 
• Linear Programming and Economic Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1958. 
• The New Industrial State or Son of Affluence. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1967. 
• "The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics". The American Economic Review (American Economic Association) 64 (2): 1–14. 1974. JSTOR 1816009. 
• "Lessons Learned from U.S. Welfare Reform". Prisme (Cournot Centre for Economic Studies) (2). November 2003. http://www.centre-cournot.org/index.php/2003/11/26/lessons-learned-from-u-s-welfare-reform/#more-276/. 
• "The last 50 years in growth theory and the next 10". Oxford Review of Economic Policy 23 (1): 3–14. 2007. DOI:10.1093/oxrep/grm004. 

See also[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Nobel Autobiography
• Video Interview with Solow from NobelPrize.org
• Articles written by Solow for the New York Review of Books
• Robert M. Solow – Prize Lecture
• Solow in the Tropics. By John Toye. History of Political Economy, 41, 1: 221-240
• IDEAS/RePEc