As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions[2] and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE)[3] at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
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.
After working eight years as a professional organizer, he rejected communism as unscientific and attended Columbia University, where he studied under George Stigler and obtained an MA in economics in 1960.
Fogel pointed out that the absence of railroads would have substantially increased transportation costs from farms to primary markets, particularly in the Midwest, and changed the geographic location of agricultural production.
In 1989 Fogel published Without Consent or Contract The Rise and Fall of American Slavery as a response to criticism stemming from what some perceived as the cold and calculating conclusions found in his earlier work, Time on the Cross.
In it he very clearly spells out a moral indictment of slavery when he references things such as the high infant mortality rate from overworked pregnant women, and the cruel slave hierarchies established by their masters.
His main point ultimately comes across, though, as he explains how a small group of very vocal and committed Evangelical Christian reformers led the fight against slavery until it became a political force that captured the attention of the President of the United States.
His book delves deeply into why some of America's most widely respected leaders went from seeing slavery as a highly profitable workforce (which his findings indicate as true) to something that must be abolished on moral grounds.
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'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.
"[13] Fogel was the director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE)[3] at the University 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.
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.
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.