cliometricseconomic analysis

American economist, recipient, with Robert W. Fogel, of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economics. The two were recognized for their pioneering work in cliometrics—also called “new economic history”—the application of economic theory and statistical methods to the study of history.

North studied economics at the University of California at Berkeley (B.A., 1942; Ph.D., 1952). From 1950 he taught economics at the University of Washington, leaving in 1983 to join the faculty of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.). From 1960 to 1966 he was director of the Institute for Economic Research, and from 1967 to 1987 he was director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also acted as economic consultant to the governments of Russia, Argentina, Peru, and the Czech Republic.

North’s work was primarily theoretical. He argued that technical innovations alone are insufficient to propel economic development: in order for a market economy to flourish, certain legal and social institutions, such as property rights, must be in place. His ideas were expressed in a number of books, including Structure and Change in Economic History (1981) and Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990).

American economist who, with Douglass C. North, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993. The two were cited for having developed cliometrics, the application of statistical analysis to the study of economic history.

Fogel attended Cornell University (B.A., 1948), Columbia University (M.A., 1960), and Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1963); he later received M.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge (1975) and Harvard University (1976). After teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Rochester, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago (1964). He later accepted a position at Harvard (1975–81), after which he returned to Chicago.

Fogel first attracted attention in the early 1960s with his statistical analysis of the impact of railroads on 19th-century American economic development. Contrary to the thinking of the time, he argued that the building of railroads in the United States had contributed far less than had been believed to the overall growth of the economy. The publication in 1974 of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, which he wrote with Stanley L. Engerman, generated considerable controversy because it contended that slavery had been a profitable enterprise that had collapsed for political—rather than economic—reasons. The resulting furor over this theory caused Fogel to write a defense of his work, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989), which included a moral condemnation of slavery and clarified his earlier research.