�Famously Risky and Cutting Edge�

Robert Fogel clearly has no fear of monumental undertakings.

“Bob thinks of the long run,” said Dora Costa, AM ’88, PhD ’93 (economics), MIT economics professor and longtime collaborator with Fogel, Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions. “If a project is worth doing, he thinks it’s worth spending ten years of your life doing it.”

She said Fogel probably is best known for his work on slavery, in part “because it’s led to such a huge controversy” and also because “it ended up taking at least 20 years of his life.”

Fogel has gone where no researcher has dared go before, his friends and colleagues say. “His research has always been famously risky and cutting edge,” dean Edward Snyder said at a conference November 17 at Gleacher Center in honor of Fogel’s 80th birthday. “He exemplifies two elements in the Chicago approach. One is a focus on important, challenging questions, and two, a commitment to a high ratio of facts to opinion.”

Often just obtaining the data has been a challenge. For his Union Army data project, Fogel relied on military, pension, medical, and census records to create life histories of soldiers from childhood until death. “When Bob first applied for government funds, the reviewer said this just simply couldn’t be done,” said Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research. “It was too ambitious, and even if those data could be pulled together, the results wouldn’t be reliable. Bob explained to me why the reviewer was wrong, why he was convinced it could be done, and should be done, why the results were very important.”

Funds from the NBER got Fogel started, and a year or two later he went back to the government to prove his case. The project started to attract “substantial funding” at that point, Feldstein said.

Also remarkable to Feldstein was Fogel’s foresight. Feldstein recalled when he first asked Fogel if he would head NBER’s program on American economic history, back in 1977. Fogel took a few days to think about it and then accepted. “He not only agreed to do it, he had thought through what he was going to do with it,” Feldstein said. “In those three days, he laid out a program which we’ve been carrying out for 30 years.”

Now, Snyder said, Fogel’s pushing for more detailed data on epidemiological issues. “A lot of people said those data didn’t exist, and Bob’s in the course of finding it,” he said. Such tireless pursuit inevitably leads to astonishing results. “He’s never set out to upset the conventional wisdom,” Costa said, “but inevitably, he always ends up doing it.” One reason: he’s collected data no one has ever dared to try to collect before, she said. “And just given the results of the data, he ends up writing papers that have sort of the ‘gee whiz’ effect, as in, ‘Gee whiz, I didn’t know that.’”

Costa said this was exemplified early on in Fogel’s thesis work on railroads, which showed the U.S. economy was on track to grow even without them. “He did it again with slavery, and I think he’s doing it again also with health.”

Fogel’s health research has informed the current health research of colleagues Robert Topel, Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics, and Kevin Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Topel said. Topel, friend and colleague of Fogel’s for 25 years, credited him with showing that the tools of modern economics could be applied to study history. “For decades he was our foremost economic historian,” Topel said. “He turned economic history into a more credible area of economic research, and he gave us new and creative ways to look at both institutions and events.”

In fact, Costa said the slavery research “was really the first large-scale application of the tools of economics,” both economic theory and statistical methods, to an area that was “traditionally the domain of historians. In a sense, it’s really what made the field of economic history,” she said. She said Fogel has generated a long line of economic historians, while expanding students’ horizons, inspiring them to become true empiricists.

Fogel is known for inspiring others. Snyder relayed how when Fogel was hired by former dean Richard Rosett, Fogel asked Rosett, “What heights do you plan to scale in the next decade?” This turned out to have a “very profound effect” on Rosett, Snyder said. Snyder said Fogel’s “power and lasting effect on people” is “just extraordinary.”

—Mary Sue Penn