[ad_1]
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, significantly on issues of employment.
Dr. Solow, who spent most of his profession educating on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, served on authorities panels and was a senior workers 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 resembling Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who espoused free markets.
“All the pieces reminds Milton Friedman of the cash provide,” Dr. Solow quipped whereas on a panel with Friedman. “All the pieces jogs my memory of intercourse, however I attempt to preserve it out of my papers.”
In a particular 2007 concern of the Oxford Assessment of Financial Coverage dedicated to the influence of Dr. Solow’s work, the editors wrote that his seminal 1956 paper, “A Contribution to the Concept of Financial Development,” and a follow-up paper in 1957, “Technical Change and the Combination Manufacturing Perform,” have been “among the many most influential and revered articles in financial concept.”
These papers, the editors wrote, had “reworked development concept from arguably obscure debates about stability and gloomy knife-edge properties into a totally fledged, versatile framework for analyzing key development questions [such as] the influence of adjustments in financial savings, inhabitants, depreciation, and technical progress on the extent and development 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 “whole 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 development within the first half of the twentieth century. Beforehand, will increase in capital and labor alone have been extensively believed to have performed dominant roles within the development price.
“Solow’s theoretical mannequin had an infinite influence on financial evaluation,” the citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences learn. “… Above all, Solow’s development mannequin constitutes a framework inside which fashionable macroeconomic concept will be structured.”
The robust position of technological progress recognized by Dr. Solow contributed to a larger emphasis by governments on greater schooling 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 revealed in 1974 as “The Nice Society: Classes for the Future.”
In a ultimate chapter, Dr. Solow and Ginzberg wrote that “there may be nothing within the historical past of the Sixties to recommend that it’s a regulation of nature that social laws can not deal successfully with social issues, or that state and native governments or non-public enterprise will all the time do higher than the ‘Feds.’”
It was as in the event that they have been disputing the conservative doctrine of the Reagan administration, to come back lower than a decade later.
Implying help for a authorities security web to assist these with the bottom incomes, the editors additionally mentioned: “The extended financial prosperity of the Sixties helped to raise many households out of poverty however this longest growth within the nation’s historical past additionally proved that financial development will not be the reply for all who lack an satisfactory earnings.”
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 12 months in highschool,” he wrote in a Nobel biographical assertion. “Then a kind of lecturers 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 School, whose tuition was free to New York Metropolis residents, however enrolled at Harvard College in 1940 on a full scholarship after an English trainer satisfied him he most likely might 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 alerts intelligence unit that fought its method 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 residence go away pending potential 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. Trying again, he recalled within the MIT interview, “I’ve by no means held it towards Harry Truman that he dropped that bomb.”
That very same 12 months, 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 mentioned.
He joined the MIT college in 1949, whereas nonetheless engaged on his doctoral dissertation for Harvard (a level he acquired in 1951). In 1961, he gained the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Financial Affiliation to an American economist underneath age 40 who has made essentially the most vital contributions to the sector. In 1979, he served because the affiliation’s president.
At MIT, Dr. Solow fashioned a detailed relationship with the financial theorist and textbook writer 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 kids, cabbages and kings.”
Dr. Solow additionally grew to become identified for his mentorship of future Nobel laureates resembling 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 schooling 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 analyzing, with others, the character and institutional background of low-wage work in the USA and some European international locations.
Dr. Solow was not hostile to know-how (it was central to his concept of financial development), however he disliked and barely used e mail. He provided this “economist’s rationalization” 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.”
[ad_2]
