The son of a fur purchaser, Dr. Solow was a Brooklyn-born Harvard graduate with a quicksilver wit and liberal political leanings. His analysis made him a revered voice on public coverage, notably on issues of employment.
Dr. Solow, who spent most of his profession educating on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise, served on authorities panels and was a senior employees economist on President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Financial Advisers within the early Sixties. He was a believer within the Keynesian concept of presidency intervention within the financial system, which put him at odds with conservative economists akin to Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who espoused free markets.
“All the things reminds Milton Friedman of the cash provide,” Dr. Solow quipped whereas on a panel with Friedman. “All the things jogs my memory of intercourse, however I attempt to hold it out of my papers.”
In a particular 2007 difficulty of the Oxford Overview of Financial Coverage dedicated to the affect of Dr. Solow’s work, the editors wrote that his seminal 1956 paper, “A Contribution to the Concept of Financial Progress,” and a follow-up paper in 1957, “Technical Change and the Mixture Manufacturing Operate,” had been “among the many most influential and revered articles in financial concept.”
These papers, the editors wrote, had “reworked progress concept from arguably obscure debates about stability and gloomy knife-edge properties into a totally fledged, versatile framework for analyzing key progress questions [such as] the affect of adjustments in financial savings, inhabitants, depreciation, and technical progress on the extent and progress of output.”
Dr. Solow was primarily a theorist who devised statistical or mathematical fashions to explain the interaction of financial forces and was a pioneer in what got here to be often known as “complete issue productiveness,” the respective contributions of labor, pure assets and capital items to will increase in nationwide earnings.
He was in his 30s when he laid the groundwork for his Nobel-winning theories, devising mathematical analyses that confirmed how technological progress accounted for a lot of U.S. financial progress within the first half of the twentieth century. Beforehand, will increase in capital and labor alone had been extensively believed to have performed dominant roles within the progress charge.
“Solow’s theoretical mannequin had an infinite affect on financial evaluation,” the quotation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences learn. “… Above all, Solow’s progress mannequin constitutes a framework inside which trendy macroeconomic concept will be structured.”
The robust function of technological progress recognized by Dr. Solow contributed to a higher emphasis by governments on larger training and technological analysis.
His liberal politics discovered expression in a set of papers appraising the Kennedy-Johnson years that he and economist Eli Ginzberg of Columbia College compiled and edited. It was printed in 1974 as “The Nice Society: Classes for the Future.”
In a remaining chapter, Dr. Solow and Ginzberg wrote that “there’s nothing within the historical past of the Sixties to counsel that it’s a regulation of nature that social laws can’t deal successfully with social issues, or that state and native governments or personal enterprise will all the time do higher than the ‘Feds.’”
It was as in the event that they had been disputing the conservative doctrine of the Reagan administration, to return lower than a decade later.
Implying assist for a authorities security web to assist these with the bottom incomes, the editors additionally stated: “The extended financial prosperity of the Sixties helped to elevate many households out of poverty however this longest growth within the nation’s historical past additionally proved that financial progress is just not the reply for all who lack an enough earnings.”
The oldest of three youngsters, Robert Merton Solow was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 23, 1924.
“I used to be good at college from the very starting, however not very mental till my final yr in highschool,” he wrote in a Nobel biographical assertion. “Then a kind of lecturers who make a distinction taught me to learn the nice nineteenth century French and Russian novelists, and to take concepts severely.”
He graduated from highschool two months earlier than he turned 16. He initially deliberate to enter Brooklyn School, whose tuition was free to New York Metropolis residents, however enrolled at Harvard College in 1940 on a full scholarship after an English instructor satisfied him he most likely may get into the elite school.
Months after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Harvard sophomore enlisted within the Military as a result of “it appeared that there have been extra pressing and thrilling issues than what I used to be doing,” he wrote in his Nobel assertion.
He spoke German and knew Morse code, and so the Military assigned him to a alerts intelligence unit that fought its manner up the Italian peninsula in 1943-1945. The unit’s mission was to intercept, decode and translate communications between German tactical items.
For his management of that unit, then-Tech Sgt. Solow was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, however he turned down a battlefield fee as a second lieutenant. He defined in a 2014 interview for this obituary that taking the fee would have altered his relationship with the opposite enlisted males in his unit or would have led to his switch to a different unit.
In August 1945, he was on dwelling depart pending doable reassignment to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan when phrase got here of the Japanese give up after the USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wanting again, he recalled within the MIT interview, “I’ve by no means held it in opposition to Harry Truman that he dropped that bomb.”
That very same yr, he married Barbara Lewis, a Radcliffe pupil who grew to become an financial historian. She died in 2014. Survivors embody sons John Solow and Andrew Solow; a daughter, Katherine Solow; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After his navy discharge, Robert Solow accomplished his undergraduate research at Harvard in 1947. He additionally grew to become analysis assistant to future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, a pioneer of the financial input-output evaluation. Leontief “taught me financial concept and use of arithmetic in economics,” he stated.
He joined the MIT college in 1949, whereas nonetheless engaged on his doctoral dissertation for Harvard (a level he obtained in 1951). In 1961, he received the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Financial Affiliation to an American economist underneath age 40 who has made probably the most important contributions to the sector. In 1979, he served because the affiliation’s president.
At MIT, Dr. Solow shaped a detailed relationship with the financial theorist and textbook creator Paul A. Samuelson, whose workplace was subsequent door. Samuelson, who died in 2009, was the primary American economist to win a Nobel. Their proximity at MIT, Dr. Solow later wrote in his Nobel biography, “started what’s now virtually 40 years of just about each day conversations about economics, politics, our kids, cabbages and kings.”
Dr. Solow additionally grew to become identified for his mentorship of future Nobel laureates akin to George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz (who shared the prize in 2001) and Peter A. Diamond (2010). They had been amongst many high-powered graduate college students who enrolled at MIT as Dr. Solow and others emphasised that the division put the training of scholars forward of college analysis.
After retiring from educating in 1995, Dr. Solow pursued a number of mental pursuits. He and Alan Krueger, a Princeton-based scholar and future chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Financial Advisers, compiled and edited essays in regards to the U.S. financial growth of 1995-2000 of their e book “The Roaring Nineties: Can Full Employment be Sustained?” (2001).
Dr. Solow additionally devoted himself to inspecting, with others, the character and institutional background of low-wage work in the USA and some European nations.
Dr. Solow was not hostile to expertise (it was central to his concept of financial progress), however he disliked and barely used e-mail. He supplied this “economist’s clarification” of his distaste for digital correspondence within the 2014 interview for this obituary: “In the event you make communications costless, you’ll get messages of zero worth.”
