ROBERT W. FOGEL (01/07/1926 - 11/06/2013)

O controverso, mas brilhante pai da cliometria.

With a career that spanned being a paid organiser for the US Communist party to holding a professorship in the fiercely pro-market department of economics at the University of Chicago, Robert Fogel was a paradoxical but brilliant scholar.
Though notorious for arguing that slavery in the American south operated with high levels of productivity and profitability, he was married for 59 years to Enid, to whom he was devoted and who happened to be black. While highly combative in academic argument, his students found him kind and supportive.
Fogel, who has died aged 86, pioneered the 1960s development of “cliometrics”, a term that was coined as a joke but survived. The label refers to the use of quantitative methods to study economic history – introducing econometrics to Clio, the muse of history.
The two works that were generally accepted as his most important, and that won him the Nobel Prize for economics in 1993, were also those that attracted the most controversy. Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964) and Time on the Cross: the Economics of Negro Slavery (1974), which was co-authored with Stanley Engerman, were both highly innovative in their methodology and produced conclusions dramatically at odds with conventional wisdom.
Setting out to attack the idea that railroads had been indispensable to American economic growth in the 19th century, Fogel concluded that gross national product without them would have been only 4.7 per cent lower by 1890. This was explicitly counterfactual history based on taking the volume of rail freight and comparing transport costs with those for competing modes, typically canals, while supposing that in the absence of rail the US would have developed a much more extensive canal network.
The details of this calculation and the rather narrow view it takes of the possible economic benefits of rail remain at issue but, from an economist’s point of view, it asked the right question. It also points to what investors may see as an uncomfortable conclusion – that the benefits went largely to the users, not the railroad companies.
The implications remain salient today: even very important new technologies have relatively modest effects on the overall growth rate of an economy; the contribution of a technology can be evaluated only by comparing its productivity with the next best alternative; and the vast majority of the social gains of such technologies go to consumers rather than producers.
Time on the Cross was a book on which it seemed that, even though the details of the argument were too technical for most to grasp, every member of the American chattering classes in the mid-1970s had a strong opinion. This was not only because the topic was highly emotive in a society that still had big issues with civil rights but also because it was published in two volumes, with all the hard bits relegated to volume 2 and the main arguments stated quite provocatively in volume 1.
The main claims were that slave labour used in plantation agriculture could achieve higher levels of productivity than free labour, that slavery in the south was a profitable system, and that owners’ treatment of slaves recognised that they were important capital assets so abusing them was counterproductive.
The counterfactual here was that, in the absence of the civil war, slavery would have continued as it was economically viable. This last point, which was established using the tools of neoclassical economics, is now generally accepted but opponents fiercely maintained that Fogel’s view of slavery was much too benign. Never one to concede much to his academic critics, he produced a four-volume rebuttal of their arguments, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1992), also co-authored with Prof Engerman.
Fogel’s approach to academic controversy was definitely in the Chicago tradition. He was a faculty member there from 1964 to his death, except for a 1975-81 interlude at Harvard. But probably it also owed something both to the struggle of his upbringing as the son of recent Russian immigrants in New York City during the Great Depression – he was born on July 1 1926 – and to his Communist phase.
Enid died in 2007 but he is survived by two sons, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Fogel also leaves an army of former students in senior academic positions who will continue the work of the cliometric approach to economic history.


Nicholas Crafts is professor of economic history at the University of Warwick

Fonte: FT