Robert Solow

He was Institute Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a professor from 1949 on. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Four of his PhD students, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond, and William Nordhaus, later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right.

Biography

Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Jewish family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He attended local public school and excelled academically early in life. In September 1940, Solow went to Harvard College with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were in sociology and anthropology as well as elementary economics.

In 1942, Solow left the university and joined the U.S. Army where he served in the Signal Corps. Because he was fluent in German, the Army put him on a task force whose primary purpose was to intercept, interpret, and send back German messages to base. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily, and later in Italy until he was discharged in August 1945. Shortly after returning, he proceeded to marry his girlfriend, Barbara Lewis (died 2014), whom he had been dating for six weeks.

Solow returned to Harvard in 1945 and studied under Wassily Leontief, serving as his research assistant and producing the first set of capital-coefficients for the input–output model, an early contribution to computational economic analysis. This work introduced him to linear modeling and quantitative analysis, which influenced his subsequent interests in statistics and probability. From 1949 to 1950, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University to study statistics more intensively while completing his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory examination of changes in the wage-income distribution using interacting Markov processes for employment, unemployment, and wage dynamics. Although the dissertation won Harvard’s Wells Prize, Solow opted not to publish it. These early analytical projects formed the methodological foundation for his later contributions to macroeconomics, including the development of the Solow–Swan growth model and his empirical work on productivity and technical change.

In 1949, just before going off to Columbia, he was offered and accepted an assistant professorship in the Economics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT he taught courses in statistics and econometrics. Solow's interest gradually changed to macroeconomics. For almost 40 years, Solow and Paul Samuelson worked together on many landmark theories: von Neumann growth theory (1953), theory of capital (1956), linear programming (1958) and the Phillips curve (1960), a key insight for contemporary macroeconomic research.

Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (1961–62) and member of the President's Commission on Income Maintenance (1968–70). His studies focused mainly in the fields of employment and growth policies, and the theory of capital.

In 1961 he won the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age forty; in 1979 he served as president of that association. In 1964, he served as the president of the Econometric Society. In 1974, Solow helped found the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a trailblazing organization in randomized evaluations of labor market programs. In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize for his analysis of economic growth and in 1999, he received the National Medal of Science. In 2011, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Science from Tufts University.

Solow was interviewed for a 1994 on journal rejections by leading economists where he noted that he had never had a journal article rejected. He added, "Probably this is because I hate writing articles."

Solow was the founder of the Cournot Foundation and the Cournot Centre. After the death of his colleague Franco Modigliani, Solow accepted an appointment as new Chairman of the I.S.E.O Institute, an Italian nonprofit cultural association which organizes international conferences and summer schools. He was a founding trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

Solow's students include Nobel Prize winners Peter Diamond, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, and William Nordhaus, as well as Michael Rothschild, Halbert White, Charlie Bean, Michael Woodford, and Harvey Wagner.

Solow was one of the signees of a 2018 amicus curiae brief that expressed support for Harvard University in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Signers of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen, and Cecilia Rouse.

Solow was one of the supporters of Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Solow died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on December 21, 2023, at the age of 99.