Robert Solow

Origins and early life

Robert Merton Solow was born in Brooklyn on 23 August 1924, into a Jewish family, the eldest of three children, and went from the local public school to Harvard on a scholarship at sixteen.

Work and career

He left in 1942 for the United States Army, where his German put him on a team intercepting and translating enemy signals in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and came back in 1945 to study under Wassily Leontief, for whom he computed the first set of capital coefficients of the input-output model. He joined MIT in 1949 and stayed for the rest of his life. The question he answered in 1956 was where growth comes from. Economists had assumed that output rises because a country adds capital and workers; Solow built a model that let those two be measured separately and found that they account for only a minority of the rise in output per head, the rest coming from something else — better ways of doing things, which he called technical change.

Growth accounting, as the method came to be known, meant that the long-run standard of living in a country depends less on how much it saves than on what it learns, and it has shaped development policy ever since.

Recognition

He shared a long working partnership with Paul Samuelson, took the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and taught four students — Akerlof, Stiglitz, Diamond and Nordhaus — who each went on to a Nobel of their own. He died on 21 December 2023, aged ninety-nine.