- Person
- Robert Solow
- Lived
- 1924–2023
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Robert Solow, the MIT economist best known for his theory of economic growth, also cared deeply about employment and about people at the bottom of the labour market. Much of his later research dealt with unemployment, low-wage work and the labour market as a social institution, and he was never content with theories that assumed these problems away.
In 1974 the Ford Foundation and six US government agencies created the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation to run an ambitious five-year, 50-million-dollar demonstration project in employment programmes called Supported Work. Solow was one of its founding directors.
The organisation became a pioneer in using random assignment to test social programmes. Rather than relying on before-and-after comparisons, it compared people who were randomly offered a programme with similar people who were not, giving far more reliable answers about what works. Its subjects included high-school dropouts and mothers receiving welfare. In the 1980s and early 1990s its evaluations of state welfare-to-work programmes influenced the welfare reforms of the 1990s.
In the 2005 addendum to his Nobel autobiography, Solow wrote that the organisation had flourished, intellectually and practically, as the prime source of validated information about whether such policies actually work. He was then chairman of its board. By then it had broadened into education research, and in 2003 it had formally adopted the name MDRC.
Its later studies have had a direct effect on policy. An evaluation of the Career Academies high school model found gains in participants' earnings eight years after graduation and helped the model spread across the country. A study of the City University of New York's ASAP programme showed it doubled the three-year graduation rate of students who began college needing remedial classes. MDRC also served as the intermediary for the first social impact bond in the United States, aimed at reducing reoffending among young people held at Rikers Island.
Using careful trials to find out what helps people find work and earn more was an unusual idea in social policy in the 1970s. Today it is a mainstream approach, and MDRC marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2024.
Why it matters
MDRC's experiments gave governments solid evidence on which programmes genuinely help low-income workers, families and students, and helped make randomised trials a standard tool of social policy.
About Robert Solow
MIT economist whose growth model showed that technological progress, not just capital and labour, drives rising living standards; Nobel laureate in 1987 and teacher of Nobel winners.
More about Robert Solow
- Robert Solow's 1956 model explained how economies growIn 1956 Robert Solow published a simple model showing that adding machines and workers alone cannot keep an economy growing; lasting growth needs technical progress.
- Solow showed technology drove 80% of US growthIn 1957 Robert Solow used US data to show that roughly four-fifths of growth in output per worker came from technical progress, not just more capital.
- Robert Solow intercepted German radio traffic in WWIIAt 18 Robert Solow left Harvard to join the US Army, serving in North Africa, Sicily and Italy intercepting German radio messages from trucks near the front.
Sources
- Robert M. Solow, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Robert Solow Wikipedia
- MDRC Wikipedia
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