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or Sweden performed as well as they did during the 1960s and 1970s. Manynow point to their trade restrictions, high taxes, or generous welfare plans asreasons for their current problems, but why the era of success? This is akinto a question Mancur Olson posed with regard to the USSR in a VirginiaPolitical Economy Lecture – we can all explain the collapse of the Sovieteconomy, but why and how did it perform as well as it did? Iversen’s bookmay not provide the answers to these kinds of questions but it does stir the pot.

BRIAN GOFF, Economics, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green,KY 42101, USA

Public Choice105: 402–406, 2000

Robert William Fogel,The Fourth Great Awakening and the future ofegalitarianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 383 pages.$25.00 (cloth).

Recent Nobel laureates in the economic sciences have not always addedluster to their awards when venturing beyond the halls of academe. WilliamVickery, for example, who passed away just days after being named theco-winner (with James A. Mirrlees) of the 1996 prize, spent the last yearsof his life praising federal budget deficits as a means of maintaining fullemployment and advocating national price controls to inhibit inflation.Government would administer these controls by auctioning off to businessesthe right to raise prices around some predetermined overall inflation rate.The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the currency hedge fundco-founded by 1997’s Nobel laureates, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes,imposed millions of dollars of losses on investors. And with that lessonperhaps firmly in mind, last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Robert Mundell, hasbeen campaigning for the creation of a single world currency in order toeliminate exchange-rate risk. As if Alan Greenspan was not already far toopowerful.

Now, in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism,1993 Nobel laureate Robert Fogel (co-winner with Douglass North) reveals aboundless faith in government’s ability to grapple with the challenges posedby a world in which people will be living longer, working less, and, becausetheir material wants will have been sated, “increasingly concerned with whatlife is all about” (p. 191). It turns out that addressing “the urgent spiritualneeds of our age, secular as well as sacred” (p. 1), will require some goodold-fashioned income redistribution in the form of increased federal spendingon public health, education and retirement programs. Readers are advised to

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keep Thomas Sowell’sQuest for Cosmic Justice(1999) near at hand as anantidote to Fogel’s statist prophesying.

The product of “four decades of research on the interrelationships amongeconomic growth, technological change, demographic change, and institu-tional change” (p. 243),The Fourth Great Awakeningis not an easy book toreview. It is an odd mixture of psychobabble (Fogel identifies fifteen “spir-itual resources” that in his view must be redistributed so that all men canachieve “self-realization”), Orwellian Newspeak (he distinguishes between“earnwork”, activities aimed primarily at making a living, and “volwork”,activities that are purely voluntary, even if they incidentally carry some pay-ment), and copious cliometric analyses of long-term trends in height andweight, life expectancy, uses of time, consumption, including caloric intakes,and other indicators of human progress.

These ideas are laid out in five chapters plus an introduction and an af-terword which take up 240 of the book’s 380 pages of text; appendices andother end matter account for the remainder ofThe Fourth Great Awaken-ing. Lacking a clear sense of organization, the discussion repeatedly jumpsbackward and forward in time. Some key terms are never defined, assertionoften replaces thoughtful consideration of the evidence, and the wisdom ofrelying on the public sector to supply public goods in ideal quantities is rarelyquestioned.

To be sure,The Fourth Great Awakeningdoes make a positive contributionto the literature. It does so by clearly demonstrating the explanatory powerof “non-economic” measures of economic growth. The empirical analysessummarized in Fogel’s new book help reinforce and broaden his seminalinsights linking postwar economic development in Japan to increases in thestature of the Japanese people. Here, Fogel marshals a great deal of evidenceshowing, among other things, that “economic measures tend to overestimatethe welfare gains of ordinary people during the nineteenth century and under-estimate such gains during the twentieth century” (p. 139). Where the bookgets off track (and where the significance of the cliometrics tends to get lost),in my opinion, is the point at which Fogel turns to the normative implicationsof these data.

The basic thesis ofThe Fourth Great Awakeningis that America is inthe midst of a fourth of a series of overlapping religious and political cyclestriggered by “accumulated technological, economic, and social changes thatundermined the received culture” (p. 39). The disruptions associated with theintroduction of large-scale manufacturing technologies in the late nineteenthcentury illustrate the links between religious revival and political realignmentFogel attempts to forge. In particular, the mass migration of domestic work-ers from the farm to the factory combined with an unprecedented influx of

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European immigrants to precipitate an urban crisis. Crowded housing, in-adequate public services, and big-city political corruption fomented socialunrest that supplied fertile ground for reformers.

The reform movement gathered momentum from the Third Great Awaken-ing, a religious revival that began about 1890, and which ultimately cameto be dominated by adherents of the “Social Gospel”. The Social Gospelersrejected the traditional belief that poverty was the wages of sin and, hence,the result of personal failure. They instead saw poverty as evidence of soci-ety’s failure, implying that “it was the obligation of the state to improve theeconomic condition of the poor” (p. 24). Coupled with “the egalitarian creedthat is at the core of American political culture” (p. 32), this new doctrine ofsocial responsibility, according to Fogel, eventually bore political fruit in theenactment of much of the legislative agenda pushed by the progressives, in-cluding compulsory public education, restrictions on child labor, the incometax, and the popular election of U.S. senators. The welfare state born duringthe New Deal era represented the culmination of these forces.

Fogel sees similar dynamic interactions between religion and politics link-ing the First Great Awakening (1730–1830) with the American Revolutionand the Second Great Awakening (1800–1920) with the abolitionist, nativist,temperance and women’s suffrage movements of the time. But all of this isprologues intended to confer legitimacy on Fogel’s claim that the politics ofthe opening decades of the new millennium will be shaped by a fourth cycleof religious revival which began circa 1960.

This Fourth Great Awakening, which is characterized by a return to “sen-suous religion” and a “reassertion of [the] concept of personal sin” (p. 28),is modeled by Fogel as a reaction to the extraordinary economic growth ofthe post-World War II period. Per capita incomes have risen dramatically, lifeexpectancy has increased considerably, and the number of hours devoted to“earnwork” over the average person’s lifetime has declined by about one-thirdsince the late nineteenth century; “earnwork” hours may fall by another 40%by 2040 (pp. 188–189). These increases in wealth – “we have become so richthat we are approaching saturation in the consumption not only of necessitiesbut also of goods that were in the very recent past thought to be luxuries” (p.189) – and leisure have in Fogel’s view caused people nowadays increasinglyto forego earnwork in order to “search for a deeper understanding of themeaning of life” (as if this was a new development) and created a “deep desirefor volwork” to fill their otherwise idle hours (ibid.). Religion is one meansof coping with the dramatic changes in the distribution of discretionary timewrought by technology and economic growth, but Fogel is more concernedwith alerting policy makers in both the public and private sectors to the needfor ensuring the “timely growth of institutions that will satisfy an expand-

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ing demand for volwork” (p. 204) and for correcting the maldistribution ofspiritual resources that are vital to the quest for self-realization in a world inwhich everyone will apparently have too much time on their hands.

An expansion of educational opportunities, primarily at the college level,heads Fogel’s postmodern egalitarian policy agenda. Increasing access to apostsecondary education would not only provide more individuals with thecapacity for self-realization, it would also help close the lifetime income gapbetween workers with high-school diplomas and those with college degrees.According to Fogel,

the main solution to the relative stagnation in the wages of high school-trained workers is to reduce their supply by educating more of them forhigher-level technical and professional jobs. Given the rate of declinein the supply of good jobs for those with only high school training, anappropriate target is adoubling in three decadesof the share of thosereceiving bachelor’s degrees and a similar increase in high-level technicaltraining. (p. 216; emphasis added)

Fogel sees the rising relative earnings of college-trained workers as simplya matter of supply and demand. An alternative hypothesis is that the wagesof high-school trained workers have fallen relative to those of their college-trained counterparts because the dumbing down of the nation’s public schoolshas virtually destroyed the value of a high-school diploma as a signal of qual-ity to employers. If so, then increasing by a third the half of high schoolerswho now go on to college, thereby requiring more remediation at postsecond-ary educational institutions, is likely to have the same effect on the bachelor’sdegree.

Greater longevity means that more will have to be spent on health careand retirement programs. Apparently having little faith that individuals willplan for their own futures, Fogel advocates creating aprovident fundfor everyworker: “all individuals currently in the labor force would be required to setaside a quarter to a third of their income in a TIAA/CREF type of account touse later for the specified purposes” (p. 199). These funds, which “could bemanaged by the government, by private firms, or as joint ventures” (p. 197),would replace the existing social security and Medicare systems which, inaddition to being actuarially broke, suffer from the twin problems of giving“the impression that personal savings are actually taxes” and of being “subjectto heavy political buffeting” (p. 198). It is the latter problem that Fogel blamesfor reducing the rate of return on the social security trust fund (which may benegative in some cases) far below that which would be earned on equivalentinvestments in a privately managed pension fund, not the lack of institutionalincentives on the part of social security bureaucrats to maximize those returns.

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Why a provident fund managed wholly or partly by the government would beany less vulnerable to political influence than the current system is left to thereader’s imagination. In any case, linguistic legerdemain aside, the differencein rates of return between publicly and privately managed pension fundsis atax, even if one accepts Fogel’s contention that forced personal savings arenot.

Maybe Fogel is right. Maybe government can virtuously provide“consumers in rich countries with what they want most” (p. 201), namelygood pensions, good health care, and good educational opportunities so thatthey can retire at 55 to a life replete with satisfying volwork, thereby avertingthe egalitarian “crisis” Fogel sees lurking on the horizon – a crisis which heascribes to the revival of religious doctrines that define equality in terms ofopportunities rather than outcomes and which he, as a self-described secularchild of the Third Great Awakening, fears will reverse past gains. But theassertion that society will be better off with more educational opportunitiesrather than more golf courses ultimately rests on interpersonal comparisonsof utility that neoclassical economists are trained to avoid. Moreover, itis not very productive to think of ways for government to do more whenit demonstrably cannot do the things it already does. Sadly,The FourthGreat Awakeningis uninformed by the revolution launched by 1986’s Nobellaureate.

WILLIAM F. SHUGHART II, School of Business Administration, Universityof Mississippi, University, MS 38677, U.S.A.