Fogel was born in New York City, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Odessa (1922). His brother, six years his senior, was his main intellectual influence in his youth as he listened to him and his college friends intensely discuss social and
economic issues of the Great Depression. He graduated from the Stuyvesant H.S. in 1944. Upon his graduation he found himself with a love for literature and history and aspired for a career in science, but due to an extreme pessimism about the economy in
the second half of the 1940s, he shifted his interest towards economics. He was educated at Cornell, where he majored in history with an economics minor, and became president of the campus branch of American Youth for Democracy, a communist organization.
After graduation in 1948, he became a professional organizer for the Communist Party. After working 8 years as a professional organizer, he rejected communism as unscientific and attended Columbia Univ, where he studied under George Stigler and obtained
an MA in economics in 1960. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins Univ in 1963.

The Fourth Great Awakening
In 2000 Fogel published The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism in which he argued that America has been moving cyclically toward greater equality, largely because of the influence of religion, especially evangelicalism. Building on
his work on the demise of slavery, he proposed that since evangelicalism was largely responsible for ending the institution he found to be economically profitable, that religion would continue to fuel America's moral development. Fogel diagrammed four "
Great Awakenings", called (by others) "The Fogel Paradigm." "Fogel's paradigm is drawn from what he believes are cycles of ethical challenges America has undergone provoked by technological innovations that create moral crises that, in turn, are resolved
by evangelical awakenings."

Later work: The Technophysio Evolution
Fogel was the director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the Univ of Chicago and the principal investigator of the NIH-funded Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death project, which draws on observations from military
pension records of over 35,000 Union Army veterans.

Much of Fogel's late writing incorporated the concept of technophysio evolution, a process that he described as "the synergism between rapid technological change and the improvement in human physiology." By using height as a proxy for health and general
well-being, Fogel observed dramatic improvements in health, body size, and mortality over the past 200 years. This phenomenon is examined more fully in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World and The
Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (both published by Cambridge Univ Press).

The work of Fogel was largely influenced by the McKeown thesis. Since 1955, the British public health scientist Thomas McKeown had developed a theory that the growth of population since the 18th century can be attributed to a decline in mortality from
infectious diseases, largely to a better standard of living, particularly to better nutrition, but later also to better hygiene, and only marginally and late to medicine. The work of Fogel and collaborators provided the necessary evidence that more and
better food was the main drive for the reduction in mortality from infectious diseases. As summarized by Noble laureate Angus Deaton (2013, pp 91–92):

"Nutrition was clearly part of the story of early mortality decline. ... With the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, the [Malthusian] 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. When the bodies of children are deprived of the nutrients they need to grow, brain development is also unlikely to reach its full potential, so these larger, better-off people may also have been smarter, further adding to economic
growth and speeding up the virtuous circle. Taller, bigger people lived longer, and better nourished children were less likely to die and better able to ward off disease."
--- Angus Deaton, The Great Escape. Health, wealth, and the origins of inequality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fogel

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