July 1: Robert Fogel and the Economics of Slavery
Robert Fogel, a former communist organizer who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics, was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1926. Fogel spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and Harvard, and made his reputation studying railroads and slavery in relation to the American economy, with a strong emphasis on quantitative statistics “made possible,” as he said in his Nobel address, “by rapid advances in computer hardware and software . . .” Fogel’s best-known work, the two-volume Time on the Cross (1974, written with Stanley Engerman), showed that the plantation slave system was more profitable than northern farming, and that free labor probably would not have supplanted slavery naturally over the course of time without the Civil War. While Fogel’s argument helped overthrow the dominant perspective of Southern historians, it also was taken by some as an apologia for Southern slaveholders, who sought to maintain their business enterprise, Fogel said, by limiting the oppression they inflicted on their slaves. His more recent work focuses on how rapid technological change has produced improvements in health, body size, and human mortality over the past two centuries. Fogel was married to an African-American woman, Enid, for decades before her death in 2007.
“I had worked out a two-pronged research strategy that I thought could keep me going for a decade or more. The first was to measure the impact of key scientific and technological innovations, key governmental policies, and key environmental and institutional changes on the course of economic growth. The second was to promote the wider use of the mathematical models and statistical methods of economics in studying the complex, long-term processes that were the focus of economic historians.” —Robert Fogel
Lawrence Bush -
Steve Wise comments:
Nobel or not, Fogel’s & Engerman’s book was long ago shown for the fraud it was. I’m surprised there’s not evidence of this in the JC archives. The year it was published there was a symposium at the Univ. of Rochester that picked it apart piece by piece. Thomas Haskell wrote, the book, judged by its own premises, proved to be too severely flawed to sustain any sort of profound controversy.” Turns out there were all types of statistical plunders (deliberate or not?), the authors made estimates “without any basis” and never put forth the documentation they said they would in the second volume. Everything they wrote became suspect: the housing of slaves compared well with the housing of free workers in the antebellum era; most plantation overseers were Black slaves; the masters managed to protect the integrity of the slave family; Southern farming was 35% more efficient; and that slaves were more efficient workers than free men. Lawrence Stone: “the results of ‘Time on the Cross’ were false or meaningless, and there statistical manipulations defective. In general, the consensus was that the data had been misrepresented to bolster a priori conclusions.”
I don’t know if Fogel ever apologized or even acknowledged his undubitably racist contribution to his country’s historical myths — Nobel or no Nobel, Black spouse or not (therein lies a novel), former communist or not.
Lawrence Bush -
Don Budnick comments:
This is interesting to me because in 1976 I read ‘Time on the Cross’ and wrote a paper about it for my High School AP History class. I had no idea that he later won the Nobel Prize.
As I recall, the first volume of ‘Time on the Cross’ was a fascinating report on the economics of slavery and the second volume was an unreadable jumble of data, formulas and statistics.