21 Facts About Robert Fogel

1.

Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

2.

Robert Fogel graduated from the Stuyvesant High School in 1944.

3.

Robert Fogel 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.

4.

Robert Fogel received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963.

5.

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

Robert Fogel 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.

9.

Robert Fogel 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.

10.

Robert 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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Robert Fogel argued against these previous historical arguments to show that onset of the railroad was not indispensable to the American economy.

14.

Robert 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.

15.

The implications of this, Engerman and Robert Fogel contended, is that slavery in the American South was not quickly going away on its own because, despite its exploitative nature, slavery was immensely profitable and productive for slave owners.

16.

In 1989 Robert Fogel published Without Consent or Contract The Rise and Fall of American Slavery as a response to criticism stemming from what some perceived as the cold and calculating conclusions found in his earlier work, Time on the Cross.

17.

Robert Fogel's book delves deeply into why some of America's most widely respected leaders went from seeing slavery as a highly profitable workforce to something that must be abolished on moral grounds.

18.

In 2000 Robert Fogel published The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism in which he argued that America has been moving cyclically toward greater equality, largely because of the influence of religion, especially evangelicalism.

19.

Robert Fogel was the director of the Center for Population Economics 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.

20.

The work of Robert Fogel was largely influenced by the McKeown thesis.

21.

In 1993, Robert Fogel received, jointly with fellow economic historian 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".