Robert Solow

Harvard gave him a scholarship at 16, and he arrived in September 1940 to study sociology, anthropology and a little economics. Robert Solow was a Brooklyn kid, the oldest of three in a Jewish family, out of the public schools. In 1942 he left and enlisted. The Army discovered he spoke fluent German and put him in the Signal Corps, on a team that intercepted enemy radio traffic and translated it — North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy, for three years, until his discharge in August 1945. He came home and married Barbara Lewis, whom he had been seeing six weeks when he shipped out. They were married 69 years. He went back to Harvard and this time studied economics.

Before him, economists explained a country's growth by adding up what it put in: more machines, more workers. Solow measured it. In two papers, in 1956 and 1957, he separated the contributions and found that the inputs accounted for about a fifth of the growth in American output per worker. The other four-fifths came from technical progress — better methods, better knowledge, better machines. Economists now call that leftover total factor productivity, or the Solow residual. In plain terms: countries get rich mainly by learning to do things better, not by saving harder.

He arrived at MIT in 1949 to teach statistics and never left. What he and Paul Samuelson built there — the seminar, the graduate program, the mathematics — became the discipline's American center of gravity. It was also a fighting position. Through the 1960s, Cambridge in England, led by Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa, argued that the aggregate capital in his model could not be coherently measured at all. Samuelson conceded the technical point in 1966 and the Americans went on using the model. Both sides still claim that argument. Solow attacked the Chicago school in print for decades, cheerfully. Of Milton Friedman: everything reminds Milton of the money supply, and everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of my papers. He served on Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers in 1961 and 1962.

In a 1987 book review he wrote the sentence everyone quotes: you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Productivity picked up in the late 1990s and the paradox looked solved, then stalled again after 2000, and the same argument is running now about artificial intelligence. Four of his doctoral students — Akerlof, Stiglitz, Diamond and Nordhaus — took Nobels of their own. He took the 1987 Nobel, the National Medal of Science in 1999 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Economists of every political stripe still use his growth accounting. He died at home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on December 21, 2023, at 99.

Robert Solow's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth article
  Quarterly Journal of Economics — Trevor Swan reached the same model independently that year 1956
• Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function article
  The measurement — about four-fifths of the growth in US output per worker came from technical progress 1957
• Linear Programming and Economic Analysis book
  With Robert Dorfman and Paul Samuelson 1958
• Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy article
  With Samuelson — the paper that carried the Phillips curve into American policy argument 1960
• Growth Theory: An Exposition book
  The book-length statement of the model, still in print 1970
• We'd Better Watch Out article
  New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987 — the review that produced the Solow paradox 1987

• September 1940 aged 16 Enters Harvard on a scholarship at 16 His first subjects were sociology and anthropology, with a little elementary economics.
• 1942 aged ~18 Leaves Harvard and enlists in the Army The Signal Corps put his German to work intercepting and translating enemy radio traffic.
• August 1945 aged 20 Discharged after North Africa, Sicily and Italy He came home and married Barbara Lewis. They were married 69 years, until her death in 2014.
• 1949 aged ~25 Takes an assistant professorship at MIT, teaching statistics He stayed in the department for the rest of his life.
• February 1956 aged 31 Publishes the growth model A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• 1957 aged ~33 Measures the residual and finds technology in it Capital and labour explained about a fifth of the growth in output per worker. The rest was technical progress.
• 1961 aged ~37 Joins Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers as senior economist The same year he won the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the best American economist under 40.
• July 12, 1987 aged 62 Writes that you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics A book review in the New York Times. Three months later he won the Nobel Memorial Prize for the growth work.
• December 21, 2023 aged 99 Dies at home in Lexington, Massachusetts, at 99

• Paul Samuelson 1915–2009
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades. built the MIT department with
• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. opposed
• Joseph Stiglitz b. 1943
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work on information asymmetries reshaped development economics. doctoral student
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. served under
• John Kenneth Galbraith 1908–2006
  Economist and public intellectual whose The Affluent Society critiqued American consumerism. debated in print