David Landes1924-2013, Robert Fogel ( 1926-2013) / 光陰似箭 從工業革命到信息革命As Time Goes By

David S. Landes, Historian and Author, Is Dead at 89

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Professor Landes, a distinguished Harvard scholar of economic history, was preoccupied by the importance of culture in shaping economic and social progress or stagnation.

On the Writings of David Landes:

Revolution in Time
Excerpts from Amazon.com

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Review and Critique by J.Bradford DeLong

The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to
the Present, Review from Project 2001: Significant Works in Twentieth-Century Economic History

DAVID LANDES

Revolution in Time

Life is hard, crowded, and complicated. But imagine what it would be like without reasonably accurate and generally accepted standards of measuring time. According to David Landes, Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University, a world lacking in time management would lead not only to disorganization but also to generalized poverty. Landes takes us on a tour of timekeeping from medieval to modern times and explains the culture, technology, and manufacture of measuring time and making clocks. His books include Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.
Cosponsored by the Management Department of The Wharton School.

From Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
(Harvard University Press, 2000)

I. Finding Time
"The question to ask is: why clocks? Who needs them? After all, nature is the great time-giver (Zeitgeber), and all of us, without exception, live by nature's clock. Night follows day; day, night; and each year brings its succession of seasons. These cycles are imprinted on just about every living thing in what are call circadian ('about a day') and circannual biological rhythms. They are stamped in our flesh and blood; they persist even when we are cut off from time cues; they mark us as earthlings.

These biological rhythms are matched by societal work-patterns: day is for labor, night for repose, and the round of seasons is a sequence of warmth and cold, planting and harvest, life and death.

Into this natural cycle, which all people have experienced as a divine providence, the artificial clock enters as an intruder. For example, in ancient Rome:

'The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours. Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small pieces! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial - one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I ought to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .'

And yet the sundial is the most natural of clocks, for it simply registers the movement of nature's prime timepiece. In essence, it is a schematization of the tree that casts a shadow and thus tracks the passing. Since our unhappy Roman thought sundials a plague, what would he have said about mechanical clocks, going night and day, sky cloudy or clear, keeping an equal beat and beating equal hours in all seasons? 'By its essential nature,' wrote Lewis Mumford, the clock 'dissociated time from human events'. To which I would add: and human events from nature. The clock is a machine, a work of artifice, a man-made device with no model in nature - the kind of invention that needed planning, thinking, or trying, and then more of each. No one could have stumbled on it or dreamed it up. But someone or, rather, some people wanted very much to track the time - not merely to know it, but to use it. Where and how did so strange, so unnatural a need develop?"

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Economic history

Robert Fogel has died

Jun 12th 2013, 16:55 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

 

ROBERT FOGEL, a Nobel-winning economic historian and pioneer in the use of quantitative methods in economic history, has died at the age of 86. The University of Chicago has an obituary here, and the New York Times here. Mr Fogel was perhaps best known for his work on the economics of slavery (there is some discussion of this here). His work argued that southern farms were highly productive and profitable under slavery, and that without political change the slave system would probably have continued. My first exposure to Mr Fogel's work came as an undergraduate economics student, when a professor gave me his 2000 book "The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism". It is a thought-provoking work of economic storytelling, which links periodic religious awakenings to episodes of technological change and social reform movements. But the strain of Mr Fogel's work I have found most influential was that on the economic importance of the American railroad.

Prior to his contributions, the general view of the railroad was that its value to the American economy was immense, indeed revolutionary. Mr Fogel suggested that this shouldn't be taken for granted. Railway construction clearly lead to a redistribution of economic activity around the country, and toward the Midwest especially. But the cost savings of rail relative to alternatives, like canals, were not exceptionally large; a new transport technology didn't have to be hugely cheaper than alternatives to come to dominate the market. And just as markets optimised around railroad infrastructure after its construction (and later, around highways), they would have continued to optimise around canals and other transport modes in the absence of the railroad. Taking such things into consideration, he argued, rail still gave the American economy a boost, but of perhaps only a few percentage points of GDP.

Economists have continued to study the question, and some estimates now suggest that Mr Fogel's method, which calculated the "social savings" of the railroad, underestimated the contribution of the railroad. But the broader lesson—that one has to think critically about the counterfactual in trying to assess technologies or shocks or economic policy—has been an indispensible one for me.

經濟分析史上曾有過兩件影響經濟學發展的重要研究，分別是史替格勒(G. Stigler)反省美國電力管制之成效的文章，和傅戈(R.Fogel)反省西部鐵路美國對經濟成長之貢獻的著作。它們的重要性，除了前者後來發展成「管制經濟學」而後者發展出「新經濟史」兩新思考的方法

 hc: 2000: 這周可以繼續簡介一位諾貝爾獎級的經濟學家。
The Economist 周刊Review of Books介紹了Robert William Fogel

The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism。我們可以從標題了解一些大要：美國人為何不快樂呢？富裕後需要的大概是種種精神價值觀、家庭方面的協助或更令人滿意的工作？整體社會上種種精神資源（）的平等分配是本書主題1993年諾貝爾經濟學獎共同得主（該年另一位得主為，他的書已有中譯數本，可是幾乎尚未引介），兩位都是經濟史名家。

諾貝爾經濟學獎演講「經濟成長，人口理論和生理學：長期過程對制定經濟政策的意義」極有意思。

姑且不談論「奴隸制雖不人道，卻是有效率」的說法（這只是斷章取義），他研究壽命增長的社會意義、各國人民的「身高與體重相對風險的諸等高線分析」等等，讓你大開眼界，嘆為觀止：

「處處有數；有數即美；處處皆學問，處處（以歐美為主）問的是「長期過程（動力學）」，不論是壽命（與健康）、生理學（身高與體重）等等的社會意義。這次研究的，更是種種「品質的長期動力學之社會意義（美國從1800年起精神上的第四次覺醒1968左右Fogel所擔心的是種種「品質」的分配不當。

種種「品質qualities」指的是：自尊、重視家庭、規訓discipline）、對品質的欣賞－最重要的是：人生的目的感 ( A SENSE OF PURPOSE)讀者應可看出這些也是本網站的主旨，所以樂為之簡介：人、我、家、工作之神聖與重要，猶如戴明博士一生行止之啟示

Notes on Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross. Fogel and Engerman feel their research provides corrections to the traditional view of the economics of slavery. This traditional view involves the following assertions ...



Notes on Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross

Fogel and Engerman feel their research provides corrections to the traditional view of the economics of slavery. This traditional view involves the following assertions about the economics of slavery:

Slavery was generally an unprofitable investment and depended upon raising and selling slaves to be profitable.
Slavery was only profitable on new, highly fertile land.
Slavery as an economic institution was economically moribund.
Agricultural production based upon slave labor was economically inefficient.
slavery caused the economy of the South to stagnate, or at least retarded its economic growth, during the period before the Civil War.
Slavery provided extremely harsh material conditions for the typical slave.

The principal corrections that Fogel and Engnerman felt needed to be made in this traditional view are:

Slavery was not an economically irrational system. The price of slaves was justified by the profits to be earned with slave labor.
Slavery was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War and there was no evidence that it would have ended without political intervention.
Plantation agriculture based upon slave labor was not economically inefficient. It may have been significantly more efficient than family farming.
The typical slave field-hand was not unproductive. On average the typical slave field-hand may have been more productive than a free, white field-hand.
Slavery was not incompatible with industrial production.
The slave family was the basic unit of social organization and slave owners encouraged the stability of slave families. Most slave sales were of whole families or of individuals who were readily to leave the family.
The material standard of living of slaves in the South compared favorably with that of free workers in industry.
Over the course of a field-hand slave's lifetime he received about 90 percent of the value of his production.
The economy of the antebellum South was not stagnating. In the period between 1840 and 1860 per capita income increased faster in the South than in the rest of the country.
Slavery was generally an unprofitable investment and depended upon raising and selling slaves to be profitable.
Slavery was only profitable on new, highly fertile land.
Slavery as an economic institution was economically moribund.
Agricultural production based upon slave labor was economically inefficient.
slavery caused the economy of the South to stagnate, or at least retarded its economic growth, during the period before the Civil War.
Slavery provided extremely harsh material conditions for the typical slave.

The principal corrections that Fogel and Engnerman felt needed to be made in this traditional view are:

Slavery was not an economically irrational system. The price of slaves was justified by the profits to be earned with slave labor.
Slavery was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War and there was no evidence that it would have ended without political intervention.
Plantation agriculture based upon slave labor was not economically inefficient. It may have been significantly more efficient than family farming.
The typical slave field-hand was not unproductive. On average the typical slave field-hand may have been more productive than a free, white field-hand.
Slavery was not incompatible with industrial production.
The slave family was the basic unit of social organization and slave owners encouraged the stability of slave families. Most slave sales were of whole families or of individuals who were readily to leave the family.
The material standard of living of slaves in the South compared favorably with that of free workers in industry.
Over the course of a field-hand slave's lifetime he received about 90 percent of the value of his production.
The economy of the antebellum South was not stagnating. In the period between 1840 and 1860 per capita income increased faster in the South than in the rest of the country.

Robert Fogel, won Nobel Prize in Economics, 1926-2013

By Ethan Grove

JUNE 11, 2013

Robert W. Fogel, an economic historian at the University of Chicago who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his studies of slavery in the United States and the role railroads played in the development of the economy, died Tuesday, June 11. His death at age 86 followed a brief illness, according to his family.

Fogel used quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change. His work often challenged conventional wisdom and was, at the time, controversial. His research showed that the economic impact of railroads in the 19th century was far less than generally assumed.

“Professor Fogel has changed the way that people think about several really important topics through his work. When you find such a new way of thinking about things, that’s going to discomfort some people,” said Hoyt Bleakley, associate professor of economics at Chicago Booth, who taught a course with Fogel this year.

Fogel was an active faculty member in Economics and the Booth School of Business, where he continued to do research and taught three courses covering the economics and demographics of marketing, population and the economy, and business ethics. Fogel was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions, director of the University of Chicago Center for Population Economics and a faculty member of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought.

“He gave his students, staff and collaborators an incredible amount of freedom,” said Joseph Burton, executive director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago. “I was always struck by how supportive he was of original thinking, and by how much freedom we had to carry out his research agenda, as well as build our own projects and interests.”

Burton, who is a former research director at the Center for Population Economics, said Fogel always made sure to credit others for their work, and was a mentor to many economists and economic historians.

“It’s been a real pleasure to be in the classroom with him because he had such a unique perspective that was informed in part by his lifetime of work as well as by his personal experiences,” Bleakley said. “He was always thinking about the world from the perspective of an economist and from the perspective of a data cruncher. He was very interested in how the world works and in how our lives have changed and will continue to change.”

Nathaniel Grotte, associate director of the Center for Population Economics, said, “What will really stick with me is his incredible generosity with his time and expertise, and how unfailingly kind he always was to everyone. He thrived on discussion and debate, and nothing made him happier than being challenged.”

Fogel first attracted attention as a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University in 1962 with his statistical analysis of the impact of railroads on 19th-century American economic development. In his book Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, he showed that the U.S. economy in the 1800s would have grown at the same rate, even if railroads didn’t exist.

His book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, written with Stanley Engerman, sparked debate from the moment it was published in 1974. In it, Fogel and Engerman challenged the long-held assumption, by then taken as fact, that slavery was unprofitable, inefficient and in decline in the years leading up to the Civil War. Their research found that slave farms were as productive as free farms and that the viability of slavery — as well as the economy of the antebellum South — was increasing. His four-volume Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery continued to generate controversy.

Fogel and Engerman met when both were at Johns Hopkins. “We shared an office in the attic with about four other people,” Engerman said, adding that while in school the pair already had started thinking about the research that would become Time on the Cross, but they had to wait until Fogel had finished Railroads and American Economic Growth.

“He was quite willing to approach problems in a way that other people didn’t,” Engerman said. “He looked at them in a different way than most other people did. By asking slightly different questions he was able to learn quite a lot and teach people a lot. He also was probably as hard a working person as anyone would meet.”

In the 1980s, Fogel began to focus on what he called “the problem of creating and studying larger life-cycle and intergenerational data sets.” This research led him to write many research papers and several books on the economics of aging, including The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, and The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700. The Changing Body was written with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong.

During his career, Fogel wrote 22 books—the most recent, released in April, Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics. He also was working on three others at the time of his death. Fogel also published 90 papers in academic journals. Much of his research since 1991 was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute on Aging Program. The National Science Foundation also funded his research.

Among Fogel’s recent projects was an examination of veterans of the Union Army, Bleakley said, “which again has been a long, hard slog through data with the intent of seeing how human health and potential have changed dramatically over time, and of understanding trends and reasons for those trends.”

“I had the privilege of teaching with Bob Fogel this past year, and I saw some of that approach in the class we taught. He would take something that the students and I had a much shorter-term perspective on, and he would just stretch that way out and say, ‘Look, this phenomenon that you may think of here, it also appeared 50 years ago, 100 years ago with this twist.’”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Fogel the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change,” according to the Nobel citation. The Academy called his study of railroads and American economic growth a “scientific breakthrough.” Fogel shared the Nobel Prize with Douglass North, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Alliance for Aging Research recognized Fogel as the “Indispensable Person in Health Research” for 2006, for his work on the economics of health and health care.

Fogel was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was chosen as one of the “1,000 Makers of the 20th Century” by the London Times.

Fogel was president of the American Economic Association in 1998.

During his academic career, he spoke at more than 230 faculty seminars and workshops at colleges and universities around the world.

Fogel was born in New York City on July 1, 1926 — four years after his parents emigrated from Odessa, Russia. “Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I was born,” he wrote in an autobiography posted on the Nobel Prize website.

“My education in the public schools of New York City between 1932 and 1944 was an excellent preparation for a life in science,” he wrote. “Because of the Depression, these schools were able to attract a remarkably talented and dedicated collection of teachers who encouraged their students to strive for the highest levels of accomplishment. That environment led me to aspire to a career in science, and also kindled my love for literature and history.”

“Many people think of intellectuals as being above such things as pride in one’s country and patriotism,” Burton said. “He had a deep appreciation for this country and its institutions, and often acknowledged the ways his career had been made possible because his parents had immigrated to the U.S. before he was born.”

Fogel was married to his wife, Enid, for 59 years until her death in 2007. “No individual has done more to help me pursue a career in science” than his wife, he wrote in his autobiography. “Over the years, Enid has been both my most confident supporter and keenest critic. She helped boost my self-confidence when my unorthodox findings provoked controversy and criticism, and she often provided insightful suggestions for the improvement of my lectures, papers, books, letters and research proposals.

“Throughout the years she has been the overseer of my social conscience, pulling me back to reality when she saw that my preoccupation with the abstract aspects of scientific issues had led me to extenuate their deeply human aspects.”

Fogel joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1964, moved to Harvard in 1975, and returned in 1981 to the Chicago faculty, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1960 to 1964.

Fogel received a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, a master’s degree from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. He received nine honorary degrees, including those from Cambridge, Harvard, the University of Rochester, the University of Palermo in Italy and the University of London.

While studying for his bachelor’s degree at Cornell, Fogel sought out professors with varied areas of expertise, a move that broadened his perspectives during his five decades of academic research.

Sons Michael and Steven, who both live in Chicago, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, survive Fogel.

Fogel’s burial will be private. A memorial service for the University community will be planned on campus over the summer. In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations to Equip for Equality, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of the disabled. Letters of condolence may be sent care of: Center for Population Economics, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

- See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2013/06/11/robert-fogel-won-nobel-prize-economics-1926-2013#sthash.rOUa3uEl.dpuf

光陰似箭 從工業革命到信息革命
克里斯.弗里曼(Chris Freeman),弗朗西斯科.盧桑(Francisco Louca)著 沈宏亮
北京 : 中國人民大學出版社, 2007


As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (Paperback) by Chris Freeman (Author), Francisco Louca (Author) "Time is as mysterious as life: some thousands of years of efforts by science and philosophy have not been sufficient to unveil its secrets and..." (more)


翻譯問題

	on Page 13:
	"... Restless Clio 13 (此處錯誤 with Lance Davis), the Washington group (不應翻譯為集團led by North), the Harvard team (Gerschenkron), and Robert Fogel, as well as other research units at Yale (William Parker), Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and ..."

	on Page 21: 下句翻譯錯誤
	"... them. As a consequence, rationality was assumed further and further back in history as a constant in human behaviour, and Homo economicus was erected as the intrinsic self of Homo sapiens sapiens: ..."

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1.	on Page 11:
	"... Meyer-Conrad's papers on method included Martin Bronfenbrenner, Raymond de Roover, Evsey Domar, Douglass North, P G. Ohlin, and Arthur Smithies. Simon Kuznets performed the task of summarizing , commenting on, and concluding the discussion, ..."
2.	on Page 129:
	"... on almost all lists of 'stylized facts' about the Industrial Revolution. In his six 'major characteristics' of modern economic growth, Simon Kuznets (1971) points to the rapid shift from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations , ..."
3.	from Back Matter:
	"... many real-life decisions are of this nature, and that is why in this regard we follow authors such as Hayek, Simon, and Arthur who suggested that the problem of the chess player is a convenient allegory for the cognitive and decision ..."

"當然這六本書的質量還是略有差別，我最喜歡弗里曼和盧桑的《光陰似箭》。這是一本綜述長時段近代西方經濟史的著作。這個 領域近年在國內也不算太冷門，不久以前就有華夏出版社的蘭德斯《解除束縛的普羅米修斯》，上海三聯重版的馬克斯·韋伯《經濟通史》，說的都是這段歷史。弗 里曼和盧桑的過人之處在于，他們對經濟史的工具和方法論有全面回顧和係統反思，最後挖掘出早被遺忘的康德拉季耶夫“長波理論”，重述了這段經濟史。"


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1.	on Page 11:
	"... panel of discussants of both Rostow and Meyer-Conrad's papers on method included Martin Bronfenbrenner, Raymond de Roover, Evsey Domar, Douglass North, P G. Ohlin, and Arthur Smithies. Simon Kuznets performed the task of summarizing , commenting on, and concluding the discussion, ..."
2.	on Page 12:
	"... In particular, Douglass North and Gerschenkron welcomed the new development, and the former played a crucial role in it.' Kuznets explained this paradoxical fascination ..."
3.	on Page 13:
	"... Restless Clio 13 (with Lance Davis), the Washington group (led by North), the Harvard team (Gerschenkron), and Robert Fogel, as well as other research units at Yale (William Parker), Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and ..."
4.	on Page 17:
	"... Second was the work of North, whose product 'is economic history' and a thorough discussion of hypotheses. Third, there was the 'quasi-history' group: Conrad, Meyer, Fogel-essentially ..."
5.	on Page 18:
	"... But the most important dissidence was that of Douglass North. This was not new. As early as 1965, North had claimed that the 'new economic history falls short of the ..."
6.	on Page 19:
	"... (North 1978x: 78) McCloskey challenged this critique: '[North is] a cliometrician who complained (mistakenly) that cliometrics uses economic tools uncritically' (McCloskey ..."
7.	on Page 20:
	"... and to explore the way in which the frictions that are the consequence of human interaction produce widely divergent results. (North 1990:131-2) This goes back to the origin of the argument: the specific contribution of cliometrics was the method it implied ..."
8.	on Page 29:
	"... North suggested that major organizational innovations accounted for the breakthrough, as much as technological innovations (North 1965: 87-8), and Landes discussed ..."
9.	on Page 30:
	"... other' (McGoskev 1985: 54). 'z In his rather critical 1965 assessment of the current state of chometrics, as previously cited, North wrote that he used to give his students a simple task in order to highlight the limits of 'old economic ..."
10.	on Page 67:
	"... 2 Kondratiev's Life and Work Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev was born on 4 March 1892 in the province of Kostroma, north of Moscow, into a peasant family. He studied at the University of St Petersburg, following courses given by Tugan-Baranowsky and ..."

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1 2 3 4 Next

1.	on Page 10:
	"... Reading the material from the conference, however, one cannot avoid feeling a sense of confrontation and scepticism amidst novelty. Rostow, who presented a paper on 'The Interrelation of Theory and Economic History', rephrased the old resistance of historians to traditional ..."
2.	on Page 11:
	"... (Rostow 1957: 515, 517) Moreover, Rostow identified the nature of the problem as the inappropriate application of the 'Newtonian methods' to ..."
3.	on Page 25:
	"... Crafts's attack on Rostow and Deane and Cole's view of the Industrial Revolution in favour of 'a more gradualist interpretation' of 'steady growth, rather ..."
4.	on Page 89:
	"... 12 In the 1940s, another researcher taught the Kondratiev thesis at the London School of Economics: W. W. Rostow (1948: 9, 29, 45) based his lectures on Schumpeter and in particular on the 1935 translation of Kondratiev's paper. Others, ..."
5.	on Page 147:
	"... Perez's concept resembles that of historians such as Rostow (1963), who used the expression 'leading sectors' to describe these new fast-growing industries. We also use the expression 'leading sectors' ..."
6.	on Page 153:
	"... 1963); Floud and McCloskey (1981, 1994); Rostow (1960); Mathias (1969); Landes (1969); von Tunzelmann (1978, 19959); Paulinyi (1989); Mokyr (1994b), Hoppit and Wri€;ley (1994); Berg (1994); Lloyd- ..."
7.	on Page 156:
	"... industry may be more properly regarded as a 'carrier branch' in the Perez sense, or as a 'leading sector' in Rostow's terminology. As we shall see, many of the organizational as well as technical innovations in cotton were followed later by ..."
8.	on Page 211:
	"... comment in his Economic History of Transport (Savage 1959) that the 'influence of the railroad can hardly be over-estimated', and Rostow's (1960) ..."
9.	on Page 259:
	"... Wilson (1948), R. A. Gordon (1951), Hansen (1951), and Rostow (1971), with their emphasis on the exhaustion of investment opportunities in the US boom in the 1920s; but he accepts ..."
10.	from Back Matter:
	"... U. (1989). Technological Transformation and Long Waves. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA. Baines, E. (1835). History of the Cotton Manufacture, quoted in Rostow (1963) and yon Tunzelmann (1995b). ..."