By SUZANNE TREGARTHEN
assistant dean for institutional research and planning

Robert W. Fogel, joint winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, will present the W.P. Carey Nobel Laureate Lecture in Economics on the "The Fourth Great Awakening: The Future of Egalitarianism" on April 30.

Fogel's lecture anticipates the publication of his new book, which has the same title. The book, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in spring 2000, presents Fogel's argument for a strong link between cycles of religious revivals, or "awakenings," in American history and Americans' attitudes toward poverty, education, and social equality.

According to Fogel, the United States is undergoing another Great Awakening - the fourth in our history. Spawned by trends in religiosity, each of America's earlier three awakenings produced lasting political and economic results. The first, which began in 1730, provided much of the ideological foundation for the American Revolution. The second, starting in 1800, launched a series of daring reforms, including the abolition of slavery. The last awakening, from 1890 to 1930, emphasized social injustice and led to the creation of the welfare state.

The Fourth Great Awakening, which began in the late 1950s, promoted growth in the most deeply religious denominations. The political consequences of this movement are already with us, most conspicuously in the Christian Coalition.

This provocative book concludes with Fogel's forecasts for new egalitarian victories, based on shared values of liberals and conservatives. He is optimistic about American life in the future, predicting longer and healthier lives, improved housing and environment, higher levels of education, better paying and more flexible jobs, stronger families with more leisure time spent together, lower rates of crime and corruption, and greater ethnic and racial harmony.

Fogel is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the University of Chicago, where he also directs the Center for Population Economics. Having earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, Fogel began his career with the belief that by combining the study of history and economics, he would discover the fundamental forces that determined technological and institutional changes across time, and that such knowledge would point to solutions for current problems of economic instability and inequity. He has contributed important, albeit controversial, work to research on the role of railways in the American economy; the "institution" of slavery and its role in the development of the U.S. economy; and economic demography, in particular the changing rate of mortality over long periods of time and its relation to changes in the standard of living during recent centuries.

Fogel's scientific breakthrough was his 1964 book, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History, on the role of the railways in the American economy. Earlier work by economists had concluded that modern economic growth was due to certain important discoveries having played a vital role in development. Fogel tested this hypothesis and rejected it. His research led him to believe that the sum of many specific technical changes, rather than a few great innovations, determined the pace of economic development. He finds it intuitively plausible that great transport systems, such as the railroad, played a decisive role in development. Fogel constructed a hypothetical alternative, a so-called "counterfactual historiography"; that is, he compared the actual course of events with the hypothetical to allow a judgment of the importance of the railways. He found that they were not absolutely necessary in explaining economic development and that their effect on the growth of GNP was minimal.

Fogel's second major work was his 1974 book, co-authored by Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. This study, which gained great attention and aroused bitter controversies, investigated the role of slavery in the economic development of the United States. Fogel showed that the established opinion that slavery was an ineffective, unprofitable, and pre-capitalist organization was incorrect. He wrote that the institution did not fall to pieces due to its economic weakness, but collapsed because of political decisions. He argued that slavery, in spite of its inhumanity, had been economically efficient.

Another major area of Fogel's research has been economic demography, and in particular the changing rate of mortality over long periods of time and its relation to changes in the standard of living during recent centuries. Fogel continues to perform research in this area, much of which is reflected in his forthcoming book. His current research interests also include business ethics, forecasting pension and health care costs, and strategic marketing forecasting.

Fogel was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Douglass C. North, "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."

Fogel's Colorado College lecture, funded in part by the W. P. Carey Foundation, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Packard Hall. It is free and open to the public. For more information about the lecture, call Diana Smith at (719) 389-6138.