Robert Fogel

Origins and early life

Robert William Fogel was born in New York City on 1 July 1926, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who had come from Odessa in 1922.

Work and career

His brother, six years older, was his first intellectual influence: he listened to him and his college friends argue about the Depression. He left Stuyvesant High School in 1944 wanting a career in science. What he built instead was cliometrics — the insistence that historical claims about the economy be tested with numbers. He began at Rochester in 1960 and moved to Chicago in 1964. His first target was the American railway, which everyone agreed had been indispensable to growth; Fogel calculated what the economy would have looked like without it and found the gain far smaller than the story required.

Then, in Time on the Cross with Stanley Engerman, he turned the same method on slavery in the American South, a book that provoked a decade of argument. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 with Douglass North. He had married Enid Cassandra Morgan, an African-American woman, in 1949, when such marriages were still illegal in much of the country. He died on 11 June 2013.