NATION editorial on Fogel [forwarded by Jon Wiener]
Jon Wiener (71324.2445@COMPUSERVE.COM)
Fri, 15 Oct 1993 23:00:03 EDT
Four days and a world of merit separated Toni Morrison's
Nobel Prize in Literature and Robert Fogel's in Economics.
Morrison's writings brilliantly expand the boundaries of American
literature. Fogel's narrow the contours of history by viewing
human experience as little more than a working out of market
imperatives.
Fogel's first book speculated about how the American economy
would have developed without the railroad. This is called
counterfactual history (and has the distinct advantage that it
cannot be disproved). His most famous work, "Time on the Cross,"
was counterfactual in a different sense--no recent scholarly work
has seen its main conclusions so thoroughly discredited by other
scholars.
Time on the Cross portrayed slaves as black Horatio Algers,
who labored productively in the hope of achieving social
mobility. It claimed to highlight blacks' "achievement" under
slavery, but that achievement, it turned out, was to be docile,
efficient slaves. The authors' mistake was believing that
slaves' values could simply be inferred from economic data.
Evidently, the Nobel Committee has not heard that Time on the
Cross has failed to survive in the marketplace of ideas. One
will learn more about slavery from Morrison's novel Beloved.
But, then, the purpose of the Nobel Prize in Economics is not to
foster innovative ways of thinking about the world's economic
problems, but to reinforce the hegemony of market ideology.
--THE NATION, Nov. 1, 1993, front page editorial.