Robert Merton Solow, GCIH (; born August 23, 1924) is an American economist whose work on the theory of

economic growth Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate o ...

culminated in the

exogenous growth model In a variety of contexts, exogeny or exogeneity () is the fact of an action or object originating externally. It contrasts with endogeneity or endogeny, the fact of being influenced within a system. Economics In an economic model, an exogeno ...

named after him. He is currently

Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Institute Professor An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations (research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes can ...

of Economics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

, where he has been a professor since 1949. He was awarded the

John Bates Clark Medal The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." The award is named after the ...

in 1961, the

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel ( sv, Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is an economics award administered ...

in 1987, and the

Presidential Medal of Freedom The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award of the United States, along with the Congressional Gold Medal. It is an award bestowed by the president of the United States to recognize people who have made "an especially merit ...

in 2014. Four of his PhD students,

George Akerlof George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist and a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley ...

Joseph Stiglitz Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (; born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, and a full professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the J ...

Peter Diamond Peter Arthur Diamond (born , 1940) is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memori ...

and

William Nordhaus William Dawbney Nordhaus (born May 31, 1941) is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and one of the 2 recipients of the 2018 Nobel Memoria ...

later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right.

Biography

Robert Solow was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

, into a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He regarded his parents as being very intelligent despite their not being able to attend college due to the necessity to work. He was well educated in the neighborhood public schools and excelled academically early in life. In September 1940, Solow went to

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher ...

with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were in

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

and

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

as well as elementary economics. In 1941, Solow left the university and joined the

U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...

. 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 North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...

and

Sicily (man) it, Siciliana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Ethnicity , demographics1_footnotes = , demographi ...

, and later in Italy until he was discharged in August 1945. Shortly after returning, he proceeded to marry his girlfriend, Barbara Lewis, whom he had only been dating for six months. He returned to Harvard in 1945, and studied under

Wassily Leontief Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief (russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Лео́нтьев; August 5, 1905 – February 5, 1999), was a Soviet-American economist known for his research on input–output analysis and how changes in one ec ...

. As Leontief's research assistant he produced the first set of capital-coefficients for the

input–output model In economics, an input–output model is a quantitative economic model that represents the interdependencies between different sectors of a national economy or different regional economies.Thijs Ten Raa, Input–Output Economics: Theory and Ap ...

. Then he became interested in

statistics Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...

and

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking, ...

models A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

. From 1949 to 1950, he spent a fellowship year at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

to study statistics more intensively. During that year he also worked on his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory attempt to model changes in the size distribution of wage income using interacting

Markov process A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happen ...

es for employment-unemployment and wage rates. 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 M.I.T. he taught courses in statistics and

econometrics Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics," '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. ...

. Solow's interest gradually changed to

macroeconomics Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and ...

. For almost 40 years, Solow and

Paul Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he " ...

worked together on many landmark theories: von Neumann growth theory (1953), theory of capital (1956),

linear programming Linear programming (LP), also called linear optimization, is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements are represented by linear relationships. Linear programming is ...

(1958) and the

Phillips curve The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after William Phillips hypothesizing a correlation between reduction in unemployment and increased rates of wage rises within an economy. While Phillips himself did not state a linked relationship ...

(1960). Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for the

Council of Economic Advisers The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical rese ...

(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 1987, he won the

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...

for his analysis of economic growth and in 1999, he received the

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

. In 2011, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Science from

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

. Solow is 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 is a founding trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security. Solow's past students include 2010 Nobel Prize winner

, as well as Michael Rothschild,

Halbert White Halbert Lynn White Jr. (November 19, 1950 – March 31, 2012) was the Chancellor’s Associates Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of ...

, Charlie Bean, Michael Woodford, and Harvey Wagner. He is ranked 23rd among economists on RePEc in terms of the strength of economists who have studied under him. 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 ''Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College'' (Docket 20–1199) and ''Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina'' (Docket 21-707) are a pair of lawsuits concerning racial discriminat ...

'' lawsuit. Signers of the brief include

Alan B. Krueger Alan Bennett Krueger (September 17, 1960 – March 16, 2019) was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served ...

George A. Akerlof George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist and a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. ...

Janet Yellen Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021. She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. Yellen is ...

, and

Cecilia Rouse Cecilia Elena Rouse ( ; born December18, 1963) is an American economist who has served as the 30th Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers since March 2021. She is the first Black American to hold this position. Prior to this, she served as t ...

. Solow is a Democrat, supporting Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

Solow's model of economic growth

Solow's model of

, often known as the Solow–Swan neo-classical growth model as the model was independently discovered by Trevor W. Swan and published in "The Economic Record" in 1956, allows the determinants of economic growth to be separated into increases in inputs ( labour and

capital Capital may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** List of national capital cities * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences * Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used fo ...

) and technical progress. The reason these models are called "

exogenous In a variety of contexts, exogeny or exogeneity () is the fact of an action or object originating externally. It contrasts with endogeneity or endogeny, the fact of being influenced within a system. Economics In an economic model, an exogen ...

" growth models is the saving rate is taken to be exogenously given. Subsequent work derives savings behavior from an inter-temporal utility-maximizing framework. Using his model, Solow (1957) calculated that about four-fifths of the growth in US output per worker was attributable to technical progress. Solow natmedal

Solow also was the first to develop a growth model with different vintages of capital. The idea behind Solow's vintage capital growth model is that new capital is more valuable than old (vintage) capital because new capital is produced through known technology. He first states that capital must be a finite entity because all of the resources on the earth are indeed limited. Within the confines of Solow's model, this known technology is assumed to be constantly improving. Consequently, the products of this technology (the new capital) are expected to be more productive as well as more valuable. The idea lay dormant for some time perhaps because

Dale W. Jorgenson Dale Weldeau Jorgenson (May 7, 1933 – June 8, 2022) was the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, teaching in the department of economics and John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as chairman of the department ...

(1966) argued that it was observationally equivalent with disembodied technological progress, as advanced earlier in Solow (1957). It was successfully advanced in subsequent research by Jeremy Greenwood,

Zvi Hercowitz Zvi Hercowitz (born December 21, 1945 in Rosario, Argentina) is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University's School of Economics and has been a member of the montetary committee of the Bank of Israel since 2017. He emigrated to Israel in 1969 and ...

and

Per Krusell Per Lennart Krusell, born 1959, is a Swedish macroeconomic theorist who is currently the Torsten and Ragnar Soderberg Chair in Economics and the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, as well as Centennial Professor of ...

(1997), who argued that the secular decline in capital goods prices could be used to measure embodied technological progress. They labeled the notion

investment-specific technological progress Investment-specific technological progress refers to progress that requires investment in new equipment and structures embodying the latest technology in order to realize its benefits. To model the influence of technological change upon production t ...

. Solow (2001) approved. Both

Paul Romer Paul Michael Romer (born November 6, 1955) is an American economist and policy entrepreneur who is a University Professor in Economics at New York University. Romer is best known as the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and for co-recei ...

and

Robert Lucas, Jr. Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. (born September 15, 1937) is an American economist at the University of Chicago, where he is currently the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Economics and the College. Widely regarded as the central ...

subsequently developed alternatives to Solow's neo-classical growth model. To better communicate the meaning behind his work, Solow used a graphical design to illustrate his concepts. On the x-axis he puts capital per worker and for the y-axis he uses output per worker. The reason for graphing capital and output per worker is due to his assumption that the nation is at full employment. The first (top) curve represents the output produced at each given level of capital. The second (middle) curve shows the depreciating nature of capital which remains constantly positive. The third curve (bottom) conveys savings/investment per worker. As the old machinery wears down and breaks, new capital goods must be bought to replace the old. The point where the two lines meet is known as the steady state level, which means that the nation is producing just enough to be able to replace the old capital. Countries that are closer to the steady state level, on the left side, grow more slowly when compared to countries closer to the vertex of the graph. However, when countries are to the right of the steady state level, they are not growing because all the returns they create needs to go to replacing and repairing their old capital. Since Solow's initial work in the 1950s, many more sophisticated models of economic growth have been proposed, leading to varying conclusions about the causes of economic growth. For example, rather than assuming, as Solow did, that people save at a given constant rate, subsequent work applied a consumer-optimization framework to derive savings behavior endogenously, allowing saving rates to vary at different points in time, depending on income flows, for example. In the 1980s efforts have focused on the role of technological progress in the economy, leading to the development of

endogenous growth theory Endogenous growth theory holds that economic growth is primarily the result of endogenous and not external forces. Endogenous growth theory holds that investment in human capital, innovation, and knowledge are significant contributors to economi ...

(or new growth theory). Today, economists use Solow's sources-of-growth accounting to estimate the separate effects on economic growth of

technological change Technological change (TC) or technological development is the overall process of invention, innovation and diffusion of technology or processes.From ''The New Palgrave Dictionary otechnical change by S. Metcalfe. •biased and biased techno ...

, capital, and labor. As of 2022, Solow is still an emeritus

in the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

economics department, and previously taught at

MIT Economics (1960–1979)

In the early 1960s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the home of the "growthmen". Its leading light, Paul Samuelson, had published a pathbreaking undergraduate textbook, ''Economics: An Introductory Analysis''. In the sixth edition of ''Economics'', Samuelson (1964) added a "new chapter on the theory of growth". Samuelson drew on the work on growth theory of his younger colleague Robert Solow (1956)—an indication that growthmanship was taking an analytical turn. The MIT economists were thus growthmen in two senses: in seeing growth as an absolutely central policy imperative and in seeing the theory of growth as a focus for economic research. What the MIT growthmen added was a distinctive style of analysis that made it easier to address the dominant policy concerns in tractable formal models. Solow's (1956) model was the perfect exemplar of the MIT style. It provided the central framework for the subsequent developments in growth theory and secured MIT as the center of the universe in the golden age of growth theory in the 1960s (Boianovsky and Hoover 199–200).

Honors

PRT Order of Prince Henry - Grand Cross BAR

Grand-Cross of the

Order of Prince Henry The Order of Prince Henry ( pt, Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique) is a Portuguese order of knighthood created on 2 June 1960, to commemorate the quincentenary of the death of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, one of the main initiators of ...

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...

(27 September 2006) *Member,

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

(1956) *Member, United States

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

(1972) *Member,

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

(1980)

Publications

Books

* * *

Book chapters

* * *

Journal articles

* * * *
Pdf.
* * ::See also:

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (born Nicolae Georgescu, 4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 ''The Entropy Law and the Economic Process'', in which he argu ...

and

. * *

References

* * *

External links

*
Video Interview with Solow from NobelPrize.org

Articles
written by Solow for the

New York Review of Books New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator ...

Robert M. Solow – Prize Lecture
*

Robert M. Solow Papers, 1951–2011 and undated
Rubenstein Library, Duke University. * *
Robert M. Solow
at

br>Infinite History

Biography of Robert M. Solow
from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences {{DEFAULTSORT:Solow, Robert 1924 births Living people 20th-century American economists 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American economists 21st-century American non-fiction writers American Nobel laureates Center for Economic and Policy Research Columbia University alumni Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy Critics of Marxism Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the Econometric Society Growth economists Harvard College alumni Jewish American social scientists MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty Members of the American Philosophical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences National Medal of Science laureates Nobel laureates in Economics Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Presidents of the American Economic Association Presidents of the Econometric Society Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) Russell Sage Foundation United States Army personnel of World War II United States Army soldiers