Robert Fogel: Interviewed about his new book on the history of hunger
Nick Schulz: The title of your book is somewhat dry, but it's about an important development in human history. It's called, The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death: 1700 to 2100, and it tells an extraordinary story.
Can you tell us how you got interested in looking into this subject and what, broadly speaking, you discovered?
Robert Fogel: Well a group of other people in demography economics and the biomedical sciences and I began collaborating back in the mid-'70's to first measure the decline in mortality in the United States. Prior to that work there was very little that was known about what happened to mortality, before the middle to late 19th century in the U.S. And so we found sources of data that permitted us to recreate time series on that, and we discovered that the pattern of increase in life expectancy was puzzling. And in the effort to explain these puzzles we produced many new lines of research, some of which are summarized in the book, The Escape From Hunger.
Nick Schulz: And what exactly was puzzling about this pattern of increase?
Robert Fogel: Well, life expectancy appears to have increased pretty steadily from the early 18th century until maybe around 1820. And then it started cycling. We had actual decreases in life expectancy. Before we returned back to a path of increase in life expectancy, beginning in the late 19th century, and from then on it was a pretty steady pattern of increase. In both good times and bad times, we have a substantial increase in life expectancy.
For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930's, which in some ways was not new but in some ways it was surprising, you would think that in such hard times with such a large percentage of the people unemployed, many for a long time, it would've had a negative health effect. But, whatever negative effect there might have been was swamped by more positive factors that led to an increase of more than six years in life expectancy, in a decade.
Nick Schulz: You mentioned that, after years of increase starting in the early 18th century there was a decrease. What prompted the decrease, if anything? Were you able to tease out the answer?
Robert Fogel: It was a combination of things. One was large-scale immigration. Many of the immigrants brought with them diseases. The most spectacular cases were the cholera epidemic of '49, 1849-1852, which became endemic to about 1857.
Two boats from Germany -- one landed in New York and when people got off of that boat, cholera broke out in New York City, and the other went down to New Orleans, and people boarded the riverboats going upstream and every place that the boat docked to leave people off, cholera broke out, all the way up to St. Louis. And then, up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh. So, you had a pretty graphic example about how sick immigrants could introduce serious diseases.
The other, and more quantitatively more important, was the rise of urbanization. If you look in third-world countries today, cities are healthier than the countryside. But, in the 19th century it was the opposite -- there was a mortality gap with the cities having higher morbidity and mortality rates than the countryside down to World War II. It's only in the 1940's and 1950's that the cities become healthier than the countryside, which is still the case.
Nick Schulz: And yet, people still came to cities, despite the fact that living conditions were so bad and that it could be hazardous to your health?
Robert Fogel: Right. Well in the United States, most of the people who came to the big cities were foreign migrants. In Europe, they were the poorest of the countryside being pushed out of the countryside and into the cities. The city of London had a mortality rate that was higher than the fertility rate; and the city population only grew because of net in migration during the 19th century....
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Can you tell us how you got interested in looking into this subject and what, broadly speaking, you discovered?
Robert Fogel: Well a group of other people in demography economics and the biomedical sciences and I began collaborating back in the mid-'70's to first measure the decline in mortality in the United States. Prior to that work there was very little that was known about what happened to mortality, before the middle to late 19th century in the U.S. And so we found sources of data that permitted us to recreate time series on that, and we discovered that the pattern of increase in life expectancy was puzzling. And in the effort to explain these puzzles we produced many new lines of research, some of which are summarized in the book, The Escape From Hunger.
Nick Schulz: And what exactly was puzzling about this pattern of increase?
Robert Fogel: Well, life expectancy appears to have increased pretty steadily from the early 18th century until maybe around 1820. And then it started cycling. We had actual decreases in life expectancy. Before we returned back to a path of increase in life expectancy, beginning in the late 19th century, and from then on it was a pretty steady pattern of increase. In both good times and bad times, we have a substantial increase in life expectancy.
For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930's, which in some ways was not new but in some ways it was surprising, you would think that in such hard times with such a large percentage of the people unemployed, many for a long time, it would've had a negative health effect. But, whatever negative effect there might have been was swamped by more positive factors that led to an increase of more than six years in life expectancy, in a decade.
Nick Schulz: You mentioned that, after years of increase starting in the early 18th century there was a decrease. What prompted the decrease, if anything? Were you able to tease out the answer?
Robert Fogel: It was a combination of things. One was large-scale immigration. Many of the immigrants brought with them diseases. The most spectacular cases were the cholera epidemic of '49, 1849-1852, which became endemic to about 1857.
Two boats from Germany -- one landed in New York and when people got off of that boat, cholera broke out in New York City, and the other went down to New Orleans, and people boarded the riverboats going upstream and every place that the boat docked to leave people off, cholera broke out, all the way up to St. Louis. And then, up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh. So, you had a pretty graphic example about how sick immigrants could introduce serious diseases.
The other, and more quantitatively more important, was the rise of urbanization. If you look in third-world countries today, cities are healthier than the countryside. But, in the 19th century it was the opposite -- there was a mortality gap with the cities having higher morbidity and mortality rates than the countryside down to World War II. It's only in the 1940's and 1950's that the cities become healthier than the countryside, which is still the case.
Nick Schulz: And yet, people still came to cities, despite the fact that living conditions were so bad and that it could be hazardous to your health?
Robert Fogel: Right. Well in the United States, most of the people who came to the big cities were foreign migrants. In Europe, they were the poorest of the countryside being pushed out of the countryside and into the cities. The city of London had a mortality rate that was higher than the fertility rate; and the city population only grew because of net in migration during the 19th century....