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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-policy issues, significantly on issues of employment.
Dr. Solow, who spent most of his profession instructing on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise, served on authorities panels and was a senior employees economist on President Kennedy’s Council of Financial Advisers within the early Sixties. He was a believer within the Keynesian idea of presidency intervention within the economic system, which put him at odds with conservative economists equivalent 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 maintain it out of my papers.”
In a particular 2007 subject of the Oxford Assessment of Financial Coverage dedicated to the influence of Dr. Solow’s work, the editors wrote that his seminal 1957 paper, “A Contribution to the Idea of Financial Progress,” and a follow-up paper in 1958, “Technical Change and the Combination Manufacturing Perform,” have been “among the many most influential and revered articles in financial idea.”
These papers, the editors wrote, had “reworked progress idea from arguably obscure debates about stability and gloomy knife-edge properties into a completely fledged, versatile framework for analyzing key progress questions [such as] the influence of modifications in financial savings, inhabitants, depreciation, and technical progress on the extent and progress of output.”
Dr. Solow was basically 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 generally known as “whole issue productiveness,” the respective contributions of labor, pure sources and capital items to will increase in nationwide revenue.
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 have been broadly believed to have performed dominant roles within the progress price.
“Solow’s theoretical mannequin had an unlimited influence on financial evaluation,” the citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences learn. “Above all, Solow’s progress mannequin constitutes a framework inside which fashionable macroeconomic idea may be structured.”
The sturdy function of technological progress recognized by Dr. Solow contributed to a larger emphasis by governments on larger training and technological analysis.
His liberal politics discovered expression in a group of papers appraising the Kennedy-Johnson years that he and the late economist Eli Ginzberg of Columbia College compiled and edited. It was printed in 1974 as “The Nice Society: Classes for the Future.”
In a closing chapter, Dr. Solow and Ginzberg wrote that “there may be 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 at all times do higher than the ‘Feds.’ ”
It was as in the event that they have been disputing the conservative doctrine of the Reagan administration, to return 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 carry many households out of poverty however this longest growth within the nation’s historical past additionally proved that financial progress will not be the reply for all who lack an sufficient revenue.”
The oldest of three youngsters, Robert Merton Solow was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 23, 1924.
“I used to be good in school from the very starting, however not very mental till my final yr in highschool,” he wrote in a Nobel biographical assertion. “Then a type of academics who make a distinction taught me to learn the good 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 Faculty, whose tuition was free to New York Metropolis residents however enrolled at Harvard College in 1940 on a full scholarship after an English instructor persuaded him he most likely may get into the elite faculty.
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 indicators intelligence unit that fought its approach up the Italian peninsula in 1943-45. 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 residence go away pending attainable reassignment to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan when phrase got here of the Japanese give up after the US 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 [President] Harry Truman that he dropped that bomb.”
That very same yr, he married Barbara Lewis, a Radcliffe pupil who turned an financial historian. She died in 2014. Survivors embrace sons John Solow and Andrew Solow; a daughter, Katherine Solow; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After his army discharge, Robert Solow accomplished his undergraduate research at Harvard in 1947. He additionally turned analysis assistant to future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, a pioneer of the financial input-output evaluation. Leontief “taught me financial idea 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 gained the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Financial Affiliation to an American economist below age 40 who has made probably the most vital contributions to the sector. In 1979, he served because the affiliation’s president.
At MIT, Dr. Solow fashioned an in depth 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 virtually day by day conversations about economics, politics, our youngsters, cabbages and kings.”
Dr. Solow additionally turned identified for his mentorship of future Nobel laureates equivalent to George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz (who shared the prize in 2001) and Peter A. Diamond (2010). They have 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 instructing in 1995, Dr. Solow pursued a number of mental pursuits. He and Alan Krueger, a Princeton-based scholar and future chairman of President Obama’s Council of Financial Advisers, compiled and edited essays in regards to the U.S. financial growth of 1995-2000 of their ebook “The Roaring Nineties: Can Full Employment be Sustained?” (2001).
Dr. Solow additionally devoted himself to analyzing, with others, the character and institutional background of low-wage work in the US and some European nations.
Dr. Solow was not hostile to know-how (it was central to his idea of financial progress) however he disliked and infrequently used electronic mail. He provided this “economist’s clarification” of his distaste for digital correspondence within the 2014 interview for this obituary: “When you make communications costless, you’ll get messages of zero worth.”
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