Professor Robert Fogel

Here’s an interesting Sunday read. This is an interview with Robert Fogel who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993. He’s discussing his recent book The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death: 1700 to 2100.
Fogel has been a pioneer in using statistics to help explain economic history. Here’s a sample from the interview:

Nick Schulz: The first chapter of the book is called, “The Persistence of Misery In Europe and America Before 1900”. What was so miserable about life before the 20th century?
Robert Fogel: Well first of all it was short. The life expectancy, if I can go back to 1700, was only about 35 years at birth. In 1900, 200 years later, it had increased by about 12 years — it was in the neighborhood of 47 in Western European countries. And, today it’s 77 or 78, so in a century we added 30 years to life expectancy, maybe a little bit more.
Nick Schulz: That’s obviously unprecedented for life expectancy to increase by such a large amount in one century. What were the primary drivers of that?
Robert Fogel: Public health reform, cleaning up of the water supply, cleaning up of the milk supply. But if you said what was the single most important factor, it’s technological change.
Let me give you one small example. We complain a lot about air pollution today, but there were 200,000 horses in New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. And when you walked around in New York City, you were breathing pulverized horse manure — a much worse pollutant, than the exhausts of automobiles. Indeed in the United States, the automobile was considered the solution to the horse problem because pulverized horse manure carried a lot of deadly pathogens.
So technological change made it possible to greatly increase the food supply and permit levels of nutrition that were not previously attainable. Secondly, it made it possible to have a safe water supply. We needed a more modern technology to be able to carry away waste water and provide safe water, both through filtering and chlorination. And, still another area was the development of vaccines, which made it possible to inoculate the very young against diseases. And with better nutrition, you greatly increase the physiology of human beings.

Speaking of Nobel Prize winners, today is Milton Friedman’s 93rd birthday! He’s two years older than the Federal Reserve.

Posted by on December 4th, 2005 at 6:46 pm


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