Robert Fogel
Photo by Dan Dry
NOBEL LAUREATE ROBERT FOGEL reached his 80th birthday on July 1. At an age when most people are retired, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions keeps a full schedule. Last fall, he taught a course on population and the economy; led a workshop on the economics of aging; worked on a book, Our Changing Bodies: Nutrition, Health and Economic Growth Since 1700, due out in 2007; and spoke at a symposium on Capitol Hill. Last spring, Fogel applied for a five-year extension from the National Institutes of Health to continue researching technophysio evolution, his theory of how industrialization has affected human evolution. Before a conference in his honor last fall (see page 37), Fogel spoke to Chicago GSB Magazine about his research, his interracial marriage, and how the field of economics has changed during the last 50 years.
How did you choose your research topics?
To a large extent, they chose me. I was working on one thing, and I discovered something else I never expected.My work with data on height by age was an outgrowth of the research I did in the mid-1970s on the economics of slavery.
My first 10 years of work as an economist was on technological change - what makes some economies grow faster than others and how to measure the impact of new technologies on the growth of the economy. It almost has nothing to do with people.My first book was on the Union Pacific Railroad, and my second was on railroads and economic growth.
I continued to work in that area until we got onto slavery. The early work was around 1968, and we applied for NSF [National Science Foundation] grants and that research lasted until about 1990. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, even though I was continuing to do work on slavery, my main interest moved into the aging area. We had been collecting information on heights during growing ages and at adulthood to use it as a general measure of the health of given populations and changes in health during the 19th and 20th centuries.We collected information from the Civil War muster rolls from nearly 40,000 Union Army men and subsequently traced them from the cradle to the grave. We had more than 15,000 variables to describe the lifecycle history of one of these men; typically we filled in 100 per man.
How did you handle the volume of data before personal computers?
In 1978,we could only take down about
80 characters of information per soldier.
Then around 1980, Texas Instruments
came up with a portable console.
It wasn't really a computer, it was a typewriter
with a bubble memory that held
100,000 characters and had an acoustic coupler to transmit
the information to a computer over the phone. That meant
we could collect whatever information there was in the
pension records on that individual, including surgeon certificates -
reports on health written by physicians of the pension
bureau. Every time you applied for a pension or an upgrade,
you had to be examined,which generated a medical record of
what your specific problems were, and such other characteristics
as general appearance, pulse rate, and so on.
Around 1986, there was another technological advance,
something like a PC that was portable; it weighed around 35
or 40 pounds. From that point on, we
filled in information on a set of computer
screens. There were screens for enlistment
information, military service
records, carded medical histories during
service, and health information from the
pension records.We had something like
25 different diseases in the health
records, and for each disease screen, we
had a set of questions designed by the physicians in our research group. Our research team consisted
of about six physicians, three statisticians, and six economists,
who had backgrounds in demography and statistics.
The medical information in the pension records was of very
high quality. The doctors who examined the records said if
they were examining a patient in the field today, they could
not have done better than the physicians who were examining
the Union Army pensioners.
Has the fact that you're part of an interracial couple affected your research?
That's hard to say.My wife has affected my research because I discuss my work with her, and she often makes very helpful suggestions. Even before I was married I was concerned about racial issues. I viewed myself as a liberal and believed in equality. Enid and I knew we were flying in the face of convention.New York [where Fogel was raised, attended school, and met his wife] still had a lot of racial segregation when we got married. There were restaurants that would not seat blacks, places we couldn't go. We were once stopped by a police officer who thought my wife was a prostitute and I was her john.When we sat in the New York subway trains holding hands, everybody would look at us,black and white alike, it was so unusual.
How has economics changed since you were a graduate student?
It's a much different discipline. The issues we're focused on, the analytical techniques, the access to information - they're all much more advanced than they were a generation ago.We don't need to speculate as much because we have computers to process data at volumes that were unthinkable in 1975. The current project that I'm on is funded at about the rate of $2 million a year. If we had tried to do the same thing with the technology that existed in the mid-1970s,we'd need $200 million a year! It would require a bill through Congress, and now we're one of many projects that are funded through the National Institute on Aging by peer review.
What do you consider your most important contribution so far?
The discovery that the environmental change and technological change have combined to change human physiology. We refer to this as the theory of technophysio evolution. And it reflects itself in the fact that young people have much lower rates of chronic diseases and disabilities today than they did 100 or 150 years ago. Of course, death rates are much lower.The average life expectancy at birth in 1850 was about 40 years. Today it's close to 80, so we've nearly doubled life expectancy in a century and a half.
What do you want to do with this work next?
We're concerned with disparities in health outcomes and care. In 1900, the infant death rate in the worst wards of major cities was about 32 percent, and in the best wards, it was about 7 percent. By 1940, in the worst wards it was about 7 percent, and in the best wards, it was about 2 percent, so we eliminated more than 80 percent of the disparity in health outcomes,or in the infant mortality rate. Today, the disparities are very small— the difference between the best and the worst wards today is about 2 percent. From historic standards, they're small; from a current perspective, however, it's still very upsetting that we continue to have these differences in outcomes by socioeconomic class, race, and geographic localities. We'll be looking at what can be done to further close the gap. There are also disparities in the process of aging. About one-third of the elderly are depressed, and depression has a physiological effect. A lot of the elderly are single women living alone who are disconnected from society. We're now working on how to reach them and involve them in community activities.Those are very expensive processes. One of the things is convincing governments at various levels that they have to pay more attention to these issues. It's also necessary to involve churches and other nongovernmental organizations