COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY RECORD  October 22, 1993  Vol. 19 No. 8

   ECONOMICS NOBEL, COLUMBIA'S 54TH, WON FOR METHOD FIRST APPLIED HERE

      Robert W. Fogel was a graduate student at Columbia when he first 
      applied the statistical brand of economic history that won him the 
      Nobel Prize last week. He used quantitative methods in his 
      Columbia master's thesis, which he developed four years later in a 
      book cited by the Nobel committee as a "breakthrough" in 
      economics.

      The award Oct. 12 to Fogel of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in 
      Economic Science brings to 54 the number of Nobel laureates among 
      Columbia faculty, former faculty and alumni.

      A student of economics and statistics at Columbia, Fogel earned 
      the M.A. degree in 1960. His thesis, The Union Pacific Railroad: A 
      Case in Premature Enterprise, led to his 1964 book, "Railroads and 
      American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History."

      The book contradicted accepted history and held that railroads had 
      played an insignificant role in American economic development and 
      that lesser innovations had contributed more. It was a pioneering 
      volume in the new field of "cliometrics," which used economic 
      theory, quantitative methods, hypothesis testing and 
      counterfactual alternatives, as well as traditional economic 
      history, to understand economic features of past societies.

      The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited "new economic history" 
      as the basis for its award to Fogel, now the Charles R. Walgreen 
      Professor at the University of Chicago, and to Douglass C. North 
      of Washington University. It is the first time a Nobel has been 
      awarded for work in economic history.

      Many of Fogel's new ideas were tested at Columbia's University 
      Seminar in Economic History, where he was an associate member from 
      the seminar's inception in 1969 until 1987. He has read chapters 
      from several works in progress to the seminar, including papers on 
      the abolitionist movement, American demographic changes and 19th-
      century federal land use policy.

      North, a guest member of the Columbia seminar, in 1982 read a 
      paper on the effects of institutional change on economic history. 
      The Columbia alumnus and New York City native, who is 67, is the 
      author of several controversial studies that used new data to 
      reinterpret economic history. His "Time on the Cross: The 
      Economics of American Negro Slavery," published in 1974 with 
      Stanley L. Engerman, found that antebellum slavery was not only a 
      profitable system but that it allowed the South to allocate 
      resources more efficiently than the North. The book won Columbia's 
      Bancroft Prize in 1975.

   SLAVERY REPUGNANT

      "Our conclusion was that slavery was ended not because it was 
      inefficient, but because it was morally repugnant," Fogel said in 
      a statement. "The marketplace could not have ended slavery, 
      because slavery was an efficient and profitable system."

      After "Time on the Cross," Fogel wrote "Without Consent or 
      Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery," a four-volume 
      work, to clarify a number of issues and to issue a moral 
      condemnation of slavery.

      Chapter Ten of the first volume, on the political maneuvering 
      between proslavery and antislavery forces before the Civil War, 
      was read to the Columbia seminar on Feb. 2, 1989, shortly before 
      its publication.

      Fogel's Columbia thesis was an effort to understand the nation's 
      first transcontinental railroad in purely economic terms, as a 
      project undertaken before its economic profitability could be 
      proven.

      While he agreed with traditional historians that the Union Pacific 
      Railroad's promoters were unscrupulous men who sought to inflate 
      their profits and bribe public officials--the well-known Credit 
      Mobilier scandal--he demonstrated that they faced considerable 
      risk that perhaps justified their gain.

      And though the railroad had to be rescued from bankruptcy in 1879, 
      Fogel argued that it bore an extremely high social rate of return 
      as the only overland railroad to the Pacific.

      Fogel was a student at Columbia of Carter Goodrich, the well-known 
      theorist of government public works, who died in 1971.

      "Goodrich was an old-style historian who didn't use statistics in 
      his work," Donald Dewey, professor emeritus of economics, said 
      last week.

      "I surmise that he pointed out some interesting problems in 
      government policy and that Fogel developed the analytical tools to 
      study them."

      Fogel earned the bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1948 and the 
      doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1963.

      He taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Rochester and 
      Harvard before joining the University of Chicago.

      He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 
      Royal Historical Society, the American Association for the 
      Advancement of Science and the Econometric Society. He is a member 
      of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding Fellow of 
      the British Academy.