罗伯特·福格尔

罗伯特·威廉·福格尔（英语：Robert William Fogel，1926年7月1日—2013年6月11日），美国经济学家，1993年与道格拉斯·诺斯一同获得诺贝尔经济学奖。以其在计量史学领域的贡献而闻名。

生平

福格尔出生于纽约市，是一位俄罗斯裔犹太人移民的儿子。1944年他从史岱文森高中毕业后，进入康奈尔大学学习。在大学期间，他主修历史学、辅修经济学，并成为了共产主义组织American Youth for Democracy校园分部的主席。1948年毕业后，他成了共产党的职业组织者。但之后他放弃共产主义，并进入哥伦比亚大学深造。1958年，他获得硕士学位，后又于1964年获约翰·霍普金斯大学博士学位。

福格尔曾分别在多所大学任教，包括约翰·霍普金斯大学（1958－1959年）、罗彻斯特大学（1960－1965年、1968－1975年）、芝加哥大学（1964－1975年、1981年至今）、剑桥大学（1975年，担任庇特美国历史机构讲座教授）、哈佛大学（1975－1981年）。福格尔与伊妮德·卡珊德拉·摩根（Enid Cassandra Morgan）于1949年结婚并育有两个子女。

2013年6月11日，福格尔在伊利诺伊州Oak Lawn的健康照护服务中心因病辞世。

著作

《联邦太平洋铁路》（1960年）

《铁路与美国的经济增长：计量历史学文集》（1964年）

《苦难的时代：美国奴隶制经济学》（1974年，与斯坦利·L·恩格尔曼合著）

《美国奴隶制度的兴衰》（1989年）

《经济增长、人口理论和生理学》（1994年）

《四次伟大的觉醒与平等主义的未来》（2002年）

《奴隶制争论：回顾1952－1990年》（2003年）

《摆脱饥饿与夭折，1700－2100年》（2004年）

Robert William Fogel (July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of cliometrics, an approach to history emphasizing the use of quantitative methods.

Early life and education

Fogel was born on July 1, 1926, in New York City, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Odessa (1922). His brother, six years his senior, was his main intellectual influence in his youth as he listened to him and his college friends intensely discuss social and economic issues of the Great Depression.

He graduated from the Stuyvesant High School in 1944. Upon his graduation he found himself with a love for literature and history and aspired for a career in science, but due to an extreme pessimism about the economy in the second half of the 1940s, he shifted his interest towards economics.

He was educated at Cornell University, where he majored in history with an economics minor, and became president of the campus branch of American Youth for Democracy, a communist organization. After graduation in 1948, he became a professional organizer for the Communist Party during which time he approved the expulsion of future fellow historians of slavery Eugene Genovese and George Rawick.

After working eight years as a professional organizer, he rejected communism as unscientific and attended Columbia University, where he studied under George Stigler and obtained an MA in economics in 1960. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1963 under advisor Simon Kuznets; there, he also studied with Abba Lerner, Evsey Domar, T. C. Liu, and Fritz Machlup.

Career

Fogel began his research career as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester in 1960. In 1964 he moved to the University of Chicago as an associate professor. From 1968 to 1975 he was also a visiting professor at Rochester in autumn semesters. During this time he completed some of his most important works, including Time on the Cross (in collaboration with Stanley Engerman). He also mentored a large group of students and researchers in economic history, including his colleague Deirdre McCloskey at Chicago.

In 1975 he left for Harvard University, and from 1978 on he worked as a research associate under the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1981 he returned to the University of Chicago, where he directed the newly created Center for Population Economics at the Booth School of Business and rose to the named chair of Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions, named for Chicago businessman Charles R. Walgreen. He won the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Fogel researched and wrote on numerous fields in his career, including not only economic history but also demographics, physiology, sociology of the family, nutrition, China's economic development, philosophy of science, and other related fields. He is best known as an advocate of cliometrics, an approach to history focused on the use of quantitative data and methods. He integrated insights from such diverse fields in his attempts to explain important historical phenomena such as the dramatic fall in mortality rates from the 18th to the 20th century. His former colleague Deirdre McCloskey credits Fogel with "reuniting economics and history". He advised many students who went on to become prominent economic historians, so that many economic historians in the United States trace their academic lineage to him.

Fogel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, the fellows of the Agricultural History Society in 1995, and the American Philosophical Society in 2000.