Contributions
Fogel's number one major analyse involving cliometrics was Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History 1964. This tract sought to quantify the railroads' contribution to U.S. economic growth in the 19th century. Its parametric quantity and method were used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters rebuttals to a long breed of non-numeric historical arguments that had ascribed much to expansionary issue to railroads without rigorous mention to economic data. Fogel argued against these previous historical arguments to show that onset of the railroad was not indispensable to the American economy. Examining the transportation of agricultural goods, Fogel compared the 1890 economy to a hypothetical 1890 economy in which transportation infrastructure was limited to wagons, canals, and natural waterways. Fogel planned out that the absence of railroads would defecate substantially increased transportation costs from farms to primary markets, especially in the Midwest, and changed the geographic location of agricultural production. Despite this consideration, the overall increase in transportation costs, i.e., the "social savings" attributable to railroads, was small – about 2.7% of 1890 GNP. The potential for substitute technologies, such(a) as a more extensive canal system or improving roads, would produce further lowered the importance of railroads. The conclusion that railroads were non indispensable to economic coding made a controversial name for cliometrics.
Fogel's almost famous and controversial work is 1974, a two-volume quantitative explore of American slavery, co-written with Stanley Engerman. In the book, Fogel and Engerman argued that the system of slavery was ecocnomic for slave owners because they organized plantation production "rationally" to maximize their profits. Due to economies of scale, the call "gang system" of labor on cotton plantations, they argued, Southern slave farms were more productive, per point of labor, than northern farms. The implications of this, Engerman and Fogel contended, is that slavery in the American South was not quickly going away on its own as it had in some historical instances such(a) as ancient Rome because, despite its exploitative nature, slavery was immensely ecocnomic and productive for slave owners. This contradicted the parameter of earlier Southern historians.
A portion of Time on the Cross focused on how slave owners treated their slaves. Engerman and Fogel argued that because slave owners approached slave production as a multiple enterprise, there were some limits on the amount of exploitation and oppression they inflicted on the slaves. According to Engerman and Fogel, slaves in the American South lived better than did many industrial workers in the North. Fogel based this analysis largely on plantation records and claimed that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – although the authors were careful to state explicitly that slaves were still exploited in ways which were not captured by measures available from records. This portion of Time on the Cross created a firestorm of controversy, although it was not directly related to the central argument of the book – that Southern slave plantations were profitable for the slave owners and would not have disappeared in the absence of the Civil War. Some criticisms mistakenly considered Fogel an apologist for slavery. In fact, Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds; he thought that on purely economic grounds, slavery was not unprofitable or inefficient as preceding historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips had argued.
In 1989 Fogel published Without Consent or Contract The Rise and Fall of American Slavery as a response to criticism stemming from what some perceived as the cold and calculating conclusions found in his earlier work, Time on the Cross. In it he very clearly spells out a moral indictment of slavery when he references things such as the high infant mortality rate from overworked pregnant women, and the cruel slave hierarchies develop by their masters. He does not write so much on what he had already establishment in his previous work, and instead focuses on how such an economically experienced system was threatened and ultimately abolished. Using the same measurement techniques he used in his previous work, he analyzed a mountain of evidence pertaining to the lives of slaves, but he focuses much more on the social aspects versus economics this time. He both illustrates how incredibly hard and life-threatening the work of a slave was, as living as how they were efficient to form their own culture as a resistance to slavery. His main point ultimately comes across, though, as he explains how a small group of very vocal and dedicated religious reformers led the fight against slavery until it became a political force that captured the attention of the President of the United States. His book delves deeply into why some of America's most widely respected leaders went from seeing slavery as a highly profitable workforce which his findings indicate as true to something that must be abolished on moral grounds.
In 2000 Fogel published The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism in which he argued that America has been moving cyclically toward greater equality, largely because of the influence of religion, particularly evangelicalism. Building on his work on the demise of slavery, he made that since evangelicalism was largely responsible for ending the institution he found to be economically profitable, that religion would stay on to fuel America's moral development. Fogel diagrammed four "Great Awakenings", called by others "The Fogel Paradigm." "Fogel’s paradigm is drawn from what he believes are cycles of ethical challenges America has undergone provoked by technological innovations that create moral crises that, in turn, are resolved by evangelical awakenings."
Fogel was the director of the Center for Population Economics CPE at the University of Chicago and the principal investigator of the NIH-funded Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death project, which draws on observations from military pension records of over 35,000 Union Army veterans.
Much of Fogel's unhurried writing incorporated the concept of technophysio evolution, a process that he indicated as "the synergism between rapid technological conform and the usefulness in human physiology." By using height as a proxy for health and general well-being, Fogel observed dramatic improving in health, body size, and mortality over the past 200 years. This phenomenon is examined more fully in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World and The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human developing in the Western World since 1700 both published by Cambridge University Press.
The work of Fogel was largely influenced by the McKeown thesis. Since 1955, the British public health scientist Thomas McKeown had developed a abstraction that the growth of population since the 18th century can be attributed to a decline in mortality from infectious diseases, largely to a better indications of living, particularly to better nutrition, but later also to better hygiene, and only marginally and late to medicine. The work of Fogel and collaborators featured the necessary evidence that more and better food was the leading drive for the reduction in mortality from infectious diseases. As summarized by Noble laureate Angus Deaton 2013, pp 91–92:
Nutrition was clearly component of the story of early mortality decline. ... With the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, the [Malthusian] trap began to fall apart. Per capita incomes began to grow and, perhaps for the number one time in history, there was the possibility of steadily improving nutrition. Better nutrition enabled people to grow bigger and stronger, which further enabled productivity to increase, setting up a positive synergy between improvements in incomes and improvements in health, each feeding off the other. When the bodies of children are deprived of the nutrients they need to grow, brain development is also unlikely toits full potential, so these larger, better-off people may also have been smarter, further adding to economic growth and speeding up the virtuous circle. Taller, bigger people lived longer, and better nourished children were less likely to die and better able to ward off disease.