My wife just let me know that Robert Fogel and Douglass North are
the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The timing (for me) was
ironic because I was just working on two of Fogel's datasets,
the sample of 8,500 black volunteers in the Union Army, and the
parallel sample of 39,000 white volunteers in the Union Army.
He collected the data as part of his larger project on mortality,
diet, and economic growth. I'm using his data to compare to
the stature and life course of Ojibway and Menominee Indian volunteers
in Wisconsin regiments, as part of my own work on the transformation
of their diet from one based on hunting and gathering to one
based on trade commodities.
As for Douglass North, I remember hearing him give a talk about
fifteen years ago when he had made the turn from quantitative
studies and econometrics toward studying institutional history as
a way of understanding economics.
I'll be interested in comments on the life's work of each of these
two scholars.
--Jim Oberly, H-Rural Moderator