Robert W. Fogel
University of Chicago
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The Urban sample is a stand-alone oversampling of Civil War veterans who enlisted in the largest U.S. cities. Drawn in proportion to city size in 1860, researchers designed the sample to examine intra-city disparities in environmental conditions and draw inferences about the impact of ward...
Data
The Colored Troops (USCT) samples are longitudinal, life-cycle samples of African American Civil War veterans. Despite their service in the Union Army, the USCT were not entirely northern in the sense that about 75% of the men were former slaves from the South who fled north to join the army or who...
Data
Andersonville Prison was the most notorious POW camp holding Union Army soldiers. The prisons population peaked at 32,899 inmates and had an overall mortality rate of 40 percent. Researchers created the Andersonville Sample to examine the later-life effects of acute malnutrition and exposure to...
Data
One of the many longitudinal datasets collected by the Early Indicators of Aging project, the Union Army sample is a longitudinal, life-cycle sample of Civil War veterans. The sample is comprised of nearly 40,000 northern, white soldiers serving in 331 companies of volunteer infantry and...
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This introductory chapter reviews significant achievements in the twentieth century. These include the development of measures of the national output of goods and services during the 1920s and early 1930s, with the participation of Simon Kuznets; the technophysio evolution; and improvements in...
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
The rise of academic economists to their current prominence in public life did not happen overnight. This chapter describes some aspects of the evolution of the economics profession in the United States and the large role played by academic economists in the design of the welfare state....
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This chapter discusses the history of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). It covers the prewar origins of the NBER; the role (and limitations) of economists during World War I; and the founding of the NBER in 1920....
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This chapter discusses the following: the New Deal; the U.S. mobilization for war; the use of national income accounting to allocate resources between military and civilian needs; the role of economists in several wartime agencies, including the Office of Price Administration (OPA), the Office of...
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This chapter discusses Simon Kuznets's plan to use national income measures to describe and explain the long-term economic trends of the industrial nations; his publication of ten monographs on quantitative aspects of economic growth; his theory of modern economic growth; his investigation of the...
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This chapter discusses certain aspects of Simon Kuznets' approach to economics; his discussions of the art of measurement; and Kuznets as a theorist....
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
Simon Kuznets passed away in early July 1985 at the age of 84. His legacy includes not only his many books and articles but also the students he trained, many of whom became influential economists in their own right. Kuznets' work on national income accounting and the creation of measures of GDP are...
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
This chapter discusses changes that occurred in the first quarter century since the death of Simon Kuznets. These include the acceleration of technological innovation; recessions; and economic growth in Asia....
March 26, 2013 - Chapter
March 26, 2013 - Book - Monograph
We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasnt the caseeconomists simply didnt have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand...
October 18, 2011 - Article
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
In 1986, an ambitious project was launched to study the aging process of Union Army veterans, the first cohort to turn 65 during the twentieth century. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, The Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death project was led by a diverse team of...
October 6, 2011 - Article
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
Along with the problem of the uninsured, rising health care costs are the largest challenge facing the U.S. health care system today. Health care costs rose steadily during the latter half of the 20th century, from 5 percent of GDP in 1950 to over 15 percent today. Experts agree that costs will...
Making use of those Union Army veterans for whom death certificates are available, we compare the conditions with which they were diagnosed by Civil War pension surgeons to the causes of death on the certificates. We divide the data between those veterans who entered the pension system early because...
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
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June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Chapter
June 3, 2011 - Book - Monograph
Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and...
This summary of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge) was prepared for presentation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health in March 2011. The book is built on the authors' work with 300 years of height and...
In their different ways, both Thomas Malthus and Thomas McKeown raised fundamental questions about the relationship between food supply and the decline of mortality. Malthus argued that food supply was the most important constraint on population growth and McKeown claimed that an improvement in the...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
This paper addresses three issues related to the relative rates of growth in the United States, the European Union, and China during the four decades between 2000 and 2040. The first concerns the source of the factors which make it likely that China will continue to grow at a high rate for another...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
This paper, divided into seven sections, considers the development of economic growth theory in light of the spectacular advances of the economies of China, India, and Southeast Asia. Section 1 reviews the debate over the sources of technological change and the measurement of total factor...
January 14, 2009 - Chapter
November 8, 2008 - Chapter
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of decline...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
While the economies of the fifteen countries that were in the European Union (EU15) in 2000 will continue to grow from now until 2040, they will not be able to match the surges in growth that will occur in South and East Asia. In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
In 2002, the Chinese Communist Party announced a goal of quadrupling per capita income by the year 2020. Starting at income levels of the year 2000, this would require a growth rate of 7.2 percent per annum in per capita income or close to 8.0 percent in GDP. Such unresolved and emerging problems as...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
One way to demonstrate how remarkable changes in the process of aging have been is to compare health over the life cycles of 3 cohorts. For the first cohort, born between 1835 and 1845 (the Civil War cohort), life was short and disabilities were common even at young ages. Other factors contributing...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
At the close of World War II, there were wide-ranging debates about the future of economic developments. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation; this topic...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the twentieth...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
Longitudinal studies support the proposition that the extent and severity of chronic conditions in middle and late ages are to a large extent the outcome of environmental insults at early ages, including in utero. Data from the Early Indicators program project undertaken at the Center for Population...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
The program project Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death investigates how socioeconomic and environmental factors in early life can shape health and work levels in later life. Project researchers have approached this problem by creating a life-cycle sample that permits a...
Around the world, as in the United States, concern is growing about who gets health care. Individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds face distressingly different prospects of living a healthy life. Disparities in various measures of health between the privileged and the deprived still...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
Over the past three centuries there has been a rapid accumulation of physiological capital in OECD countries. Enhanced physiological capital is tied to long-term reduction in environmental hazards and to the conquest of chronic malnutrition. Data on heights and birth weights suggests that...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
This paper, prepared for the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, presents an account of the scholarly career of Simon S. Kuznets. Among the issues considered are his contribution to the development of the empirical tradition in economics, his transformation of the field of...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
This paper argues that the secular decline in mortality, which began during the eighteenth century, is still in progress and will probably continue for another century or more. The evolutionary perspective presented in this paper focuses not only on the environment, which from the standpoint of...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
This paper sketches a theory of the secular decline in morbidity and mortality that takes account of changes in human physiology since 1700. The synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution, much more rapid than natural selection, which is...
Author(s) - Robert William Fogel
The aim of this paper is to describe the full dimensions of a new and rapidly growing research program that uses new data sources on food consumption, anthropometric measures, genealogies, and life-cycle histories to shed light on secular trends in nutritional status, health, mortality, and the...
Author(s) - Robert W. Fogel
The aim of this paper is to break open the stochastic component of a maj or political change and to show that what seems like the product of purely chance events is the particular conjunction of processes, each of which is definable in a systematic way, that provide collectively a favorable context...
This paper summarizes a collaborative project designed to create a public-use tape suitable for a prospective study of aging among a random sample of 39,616 men mustered into 331 companies of the Union Army. The aim of the project is to measure the effect of socioeconomics and biomedical factors...
Author(s) - Robert William Fogel
After sketching various ways in which economic issues influenced the political realignment of the 1850s, the paper concentrates on five questions: (1) the timing of the economic issues and the disjunctions in economic developments across regions and classes; (2) the size of the nonagricultural male...
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