Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York, into aJewish family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He attended local public school and excelled academically early in life.[37] In September 1940, Solow went toHarvard College with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were insociology andanthropology as well as elementary economics.[37]
In 1942, Solow left the university and joined theU.S. Army where he served in the Signal Corps. 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.[38] He served briefly inNorth Africa andSicily, and later in Italy until he was discharged in August 1945.[37][39] Shortly after returning, he proceeded to marry his girlfriend, Barbara Lewis (died 2014), whom he had been dating for six weeks.[38]
Solow returned to Harvard in 1945 and studied under Wassily Leontief, serving as his research assistant and producing the first set of capital-coefficients for the input–output model, an early contribution to computational economic analysis. This work introduced him to linear modeling and quantitative analysis, which influenced his subsequent interests in statistics and probability. From 1949 to 1950, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University to study statistics more intensively while completing his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory examination of changes in the wage-income distribution using interacting Markov processes for employment, unemployment, and wage dynamics. Although the dissertation won Harvard’s Wells Prize, Solow opted not to publish it. These early analytical projects formed the methodological foundation for his later contributions to macroeconomics, including the development of the Solow–Swan growth model and his empirical work on productivity and technical change.[37]
Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for theCouncil of Economic Advisers (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'sJohn Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age forty; in 1979 he served as president of that association. In 1964, he served as the president of the Econometric Society. In 1974, Solow helped found the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a trailblazing organization in randomized evaluations of labor market programs. In 1987, he won theNobel Prize for his analysis of economic growth[37] and in 1999, he received theNational Medal of Science. In 2011, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Science fromTufts University.[40]
Solow was the founder of the Cournot Foundation and the Cournot Centre. After the death of his colleagueFranco 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 was a founding trustee of theEconomists for Peace and Security.[41]
Solow's model ofeconomic growth, often known as theSolow–Swan neoclassical growth model as the model was independently discovered byTrevor W. Swan and published in "The Economic Record" in 1956, allows the determinants of economic growth to be separated into increases in inputs (labour andcapital) and technical progress. The reason these models are called "exogenous" 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 also was the first to develop a growth model with different vintages of capital.[45] 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.[38] 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.[45]
The idea lay dormant for some time perhaps becauseDale W. Jorgenson (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 andPer Krusell (1997), who argued that the secular decline in capital goods prices could be used to measure embodied technological progress. They labeled the notioninvestment-specific technological progress. Solow (2001) approved. BothPaul Romer andRobert Lucas, Jr. subsequently developed alternatives to Solow's neoclassical growth model.[45]
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. When countries are to the right of the steady state level, they are not growing because all the returns they create need to go to replacing and repairing their old capital.[46]
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 ofendogenous growth theory (or new growth theory). Today, economists use Solow's sources-of-growth accounting to estimate the separate effects on economic growth oftechnological change, capital, and labor.[45]
Solow, Robert M. (1960), "Investment and technical progress", inArrow, Kenneth J.;Karlin, Samuel;Suppes, Patrick (eds.),Mathematical models in the social sciences, 1959: Proceedings of the first Stanford symposium, Stanford mathematical studies in the social sciences, IV, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 89–104,ISBN978-0804700214.{{citation}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Solow, Robert M. (2001), "After technical progress and the aggregate production function", in Hulten, Charles R.; Dean, Edwin R.; Harper, Michael J. (eds.),New developments in productivity analysis, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, pp. 173–78,ISBN978-0226360645.
Solow, Robert M. (2009), "Imposed environmental standards and international trade", inKanbur, Ravi;Basu, Kaushik (eds.),Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume II: Society, institutions and development, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 411–24,ISBN978-0199239979.
Solow, Robert M. (May 1974). "The economics of resources or the resources of economics".The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings.64 (2):1–14.JSTOR1816009.
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^Bator, Francis M. (1956).Capital, Growth and Welfare—Theories of Allocation (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.hdl:1721.1/97306.
^Jones, Ronald Winthrop (1956).Essays in the Theory of International Trade and the Balance of Payments (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.hdl:1721.1/106042.
^Loury, Glenn Cartman (1976).Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.hdl:1721.1/27456.
^Mohring, Herbert D. (1959).The life insurance industry: a study of price policy and its determinants (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.hdl:1721.1/11790.
^Nordhaus, William Dawbney. (1967).A Theory of Endogenous Technological Change (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. RetrievedJuly 1, 2017.18. Turgay Özkan|Turkish| date 1979| thesis: Rational Expectations – A game theoretic approach
^Hausman, Jerry (2013), "Hal White: Time at MIT and Early Life Days of Research", in Chen, Xiaohong; Swanson, Norman R. (eds.),Recent Advances and Future Directions in Causality, Prediction, and Specification Analysis, New York:Springer, pp. 209–18,ISBN978-1461416524.
^abcMartin, Caine (March 8, 2016)."Robert Solow".Youtube. InfiniteHistoryProjectMIT.Archived from the original on November 18, 2021. RetrievedNovember 13, 2019.
^abcdHaines, Joel D.; Sharif, Nawaz M. (2006). "A framework for managing the sophistication of the components of technology for global competition".Competitiveness Review.16 (2):106–21.doi:10.1108/cr.2006.16.2.106 (inactive July 31, 2025).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
Greenwood, Jeremy; Krusell, Per (2007). "Growth Accounting with Investment-Specific Technological Progress: A Discussion of Two Approaches".Journal of Monetary Economics.54 (4):1300–10.doi:10.1016/j.jmoneco.2006.02.008.
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