Robert Fogel

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 pointed 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, would have further lowered the importance of railroads.

The conclusion that railroads were not indispensable to economic development made a controversial name for cliometrics.

Fogel was born in New York City, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Odessa (1922).

His brother, six years his senior, was his main intellectual influence in his youth as he listened to him and his college friends intensely discuss social and economic issues of the Great Depression.

Robert William Fogel (July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

As of his death, he was 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 an advocate of new economic history (cliometrics) – the use of quantitative methods in history.

Upon his graduation he found himself with a love for literature and history and aspired for a career in science, but due to an extreme pessimism about the economy in the second half of the 1940s, he shifted his interest towards economics.

He was educated at 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.

He graduated from the Stuyvesant High School in 1944.

After graduation in 1948, he became a professional organizer for the Communist Party.

Fogel married Enid Cassandra Morgan, an African-American woman, in 1949 and had two children.

The couple faced significant difficulties at the time due to anti-miscegenation laws and prevalent sentiments against interracial marriages.

After working eight years as a professional organizer, he rejected communism as unscientific and attended Columbia University, where he studied under George Stigler and obtained an MA in economics in 1960.

He began his research career as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester in 1960.

He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963.

In 1964 he moved to the University of Chicago as an associate professor.

Fogel's first major study involving cliometrics was Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964).

From 1968 to 1975 he was also a visiting professor at Rochester in autumn semesters.

During this time he completed some of his most important works, including Time on the Cross (in collaboration with Stanley Engerman).

He also mentored a large group of students and researchers in economic history, including his colleague Deirdre McCloskey at Chicago.

Fogel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, and the American Philosophical Society in 2000.

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 argued 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 quickly 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.

In 1975 he left for Harvard University, and from 1978 on he worked as a research associate under the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1981 he returned to the University of Chicago, where he directed the newly created Center for Population Economics at the Booth School of Business.

Fogel researched and wrote on numerous fields in his career, including not only economic history but also demographics, physiology, sociology of the family, nutrition, China's economic development, philosophy of science, and other related fields.

He died on June 11, 2013, in Oak Lawn, Illinois, of a short illness, aged 86.

He integrated insights from such diverse fields in his attempts to explain important historical phenomena such as the dramatic fall in mortality rates from the 18th to the 20th century.

His former colleague Deirdre McCloskey credits Fogel with "reuniting economics and history".

He advised many students who went on to become prominent economic historians, so that many economic historians in the United States trace their academic lineage to him.

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 expansionary effect 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.