#robert fogel

[gettothedancing]

In the not so distant past, people didn't work hard, but not for the reasons many think. There were no happy peasants laboring a few hours in the fields and spending the rest of the day in leisure. They were starving and had no energy to work.

The average 18th-century Englishman got fewer calories than the average individual living today in sub-Saharan Africa. Because they couldn’t eat, these poor Englishmen worked little. Deaton writes:

The small workers of the eighteenth century were effectively locked into a nutritional trap; they could not earn much because they were so physically weak, and they could not eat because, without work, they did not have the money to buy food.

Johan Norberg in his book Progress reports the research findings of economic historian and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel:

Two-hundred years ago some twenty percent of the inhabitants of England and France could not work at all. At most they had enough energy for a few hours of slow walking per day, which condemned most of them to a life of begging.

And then, everything began to change. Deaton explains:

With the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, the trap began to fall apart. Per capita incomes began to grow and, perhaps for the first 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.

[famousdeaths]

Robert Fogel : Born July 1, 1926 : Died June 11, 2013

Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was...

Link: Robert Fogel

[americana-plus]

Milton Friedman - Socialism vs. Capitalism

Economist Milton Friedman taught Donahue a lesson when Phil attempted to equate greed with capitalism. Friedman regards free enterprise as the best economic ...

On this day, Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was born. Friedman was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago price theory, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists; they include Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell, and Robert Lucas Jr.

Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function. In the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. He theorized that there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that employment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was, in the long run, vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as "monetarism", and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08.

Friedman was an advisor to Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school vouchers and opposed the war on drugs. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice.

[jimrosenz]

Neoclassical economists think the economy is freestanding and ignore institutions!

Neoclassical economists think the economy is freestanding and ignore institutions!

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1991 was awarded to Ronald H. Coase:

for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of…

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[underpaidgenius]

We have sped up human evolution through technological advance, especially increasing the size and longevity of human beings:

Mr. Fogel and his co-authors, Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, maintain that “in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia.” What’s more, they write, this alteration has come about within a time frame that is “minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution.”

“The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable,” Mr. Fogel said in an telephone interview from Chicago, where he is the director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago’s business school. “Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.”

This “technophysio evolution,” powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, the authors argue, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.

 “I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said.

To take just a few examples, the average adult man in 1850 in America stood about 5 feet 7 inches and weighed about 146 pounds; someone born then was expected to live until about 45. In the 1980s the typical man in his early 30s was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed about 174 pounds and was likely to pass his 75th birthday.

Across the Atlantic, at the time of the French Revolution, a 30-something Frenchman weighed about 110 pounds, compared with 170 pounds now. And in Norway an average 22-year-old man was about 5 ½ inches taller at the end of the 20th century (5 feet 10.7 inches) than in the middle of the 18th century (5 feet 5.2 inches).

Mr. Fogel and his colleagues’ great achievement was to figure out a way to measure some of that gain in body size, Mr. Preston said. Much of the evidence — childhood growth, mortality, adult living standards, labor productivity, food and manufacturing output — was available, but no one had put it all together in this way before. Over the years Mr. Fogel and his colleagues have pored over a monumental amount of raw data to piece together the health records of thousands of people in different countries. When he won the Nobel in economics in 1993, the Swedish committee stated it was “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.”