A Brooklyn boyhood
Robert Merton Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 23, 1924, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family. His parents, Milton Solow and Hannah Sarney, were themselves the children of immigrants, and both had gone to work as soon as they finished secondary school. They were, their son said, extremely intelligent people who simply could not afford more education. His father worked as a fur buyer, and his only piece of career advice was a warning delivered with comic menace: if Robert ever went into the fur business, he would kill him.
The family was lower-middle-class and, through the Depression, perpetually anxious about money, though his father was never out of work for long. Franklin Roosevelt was a hero in the household. Solow went through the neighbourhood public schools, skipped grades, and graduated from James Madison High School at sixteen. He was, by his own account, good at school from the start but not very intellectual until his final year, when one of those teachers who make a difference introduced him to the great nineteenth-century French and Russian novelists and taught him to take ideas seriously. He and his sisters were the first generation of the family to attend university.
Harvard, and a war in Italy
Solow arrived at Harvard on a scholarship in September 1940. Before that, he had been turned down for a scholarship from the Harvard Club of Long Island, and he said later that it was clear from the interview that he was rejected because he was Jewish. A scholarship from the Harvard Club of New York took him instead, and from sixteen he supported himself, working in a library and as a restaurant busboy. Like many children of the Depression, he wanted to know what made society tick, and he began with sociology under Talcott Parsons and anthropology under Clyde Kluckhohn. His roommate was a German refugee, and through him Solow became nearly fluent in German.
At the end of 1942, having turned eighteen, he left Harvard and enlisted in the Army. Because he knew German, he was put into a signals intelligence unit that intercepted and decoded German radio traffic from trucks just behind the front. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily and then in Italy from the beginning of the campaign to the end of the war, rising to technical sergeant and turning down a battlefield commission because it would have separated him from his unit. He believed those three years formed his character: a tight-knit group doing a hard job with skill and mutual loyalty, led by a man who never wavered from humour and decency.
He was discharged in August 1945 and that same month married Barbara Lewis, known as Bobby, a Radcliffe economics student whom he had met at Harvard and whose letters had followed him through the war. Her interest in economics helped steer his own.
The office next to Samuelson’s
Back at Harvard, Solow chose economics almost casually and found a mentor in Wassily Leontief, whose research assistant he became, producing the first set of capital coefficients for Leontief’s input–output model of the economy. “It was Leontief who turned me into an economist” he later said. Drawn to statistics, he spent 1949–50 at Columbia studying with Abraham Wald and others while writing a doctoral thesis on the distribution of wage income. It won Harvard’s Wells Prize, which came with publication and a cheque for $500; Solow thought he could do better, never revised it, and left the cheque uncashed.
Just before going to Columbia he accepted an assistant professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hired to teach statistics and econometrics. He never had, or wanted, another job. What changed his direction, he liked to say, was geography: he was given the office next to Paul Samuelson’s. Their almost daily conversations, about economics, politics, their children, “cabbages and kings”, ran for some five decades and produced joint work on growth, capital theory, linear programming and, in 1960, an influential analysis of the Phillips curve. Together with colleagues such as Franco Modigliani, they turned a small teaching department into one of the best economics programmes in the world.
What makes economies grow
Solow’s great contribution came in two papers. In “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1956, he built a simple, elegant model of a growing economy. Its striking conclusion was that simply piling up machines cannot keep an economy growing: because each additional unit of capital adds less than the last, an economy that only saves and invests will settle into a steady state. Sustained growth in living standards has to come from somewhere else. The Australian economist Trevor Swan reached similar results independently the same year, and the framework is known as the Solow–Swan model.
The following year, in “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function” Solow turned the model on American data from roughly 1909 to 1949. He found that only a small share of the growth in output per worker could be explained by more capital; roughly four-fifths came from what he called technical progress, better technology, skills, education and organisation. That unexplained portion, measured as a residual, became known as the Solow residual or total factor productivity. In 1960 he added a model of capital “vintages” in which new machines embody newer technology.
How the work changed the world
Solow’s findings rearranged the priorities of economic policy. If technical progress drives growth, then research, education, and the spread of new ideas matter more than raw accumulation of capital. Governments and international agencies came to use his growth accounting to separate the contributions of capital, labour and technology, and the approach remains standard in productivity statistics today. His model became the starting point that every student of macroeconomics learns, and it framed the later work of Paul Romer, Robert Lucas and others who sought to explain technological progress from within the economy rather than treating it as given.
He also coined one of the most quoted lines in economics. Reviewing a book in 1987, he observed that you could see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics, a remark that named the “productivity paradox” and is still cited whenever new technologies, from personal computers to artificial intelligence, fail to show up quickly in the numbers. That same year he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to the theory of economic growth.
Public service and public argument
Solow believed economics should be useful. In 1961–62 he served as senior economist on President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers under Walter Heller, alongside James Tobin, Kermit Gordon, Arthur Okun and Kenneth Arrow, another of the close, loyal teams he treasured. He sat on the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance from 1968 to 1970 and chaired the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in the 1970s. In 1974 he helped found the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a pioneer in using randomised trials to test programmes for disadvantaged workers, and later chaired its board.
He wrote widely for general readers, including in the New York Review of Books, and was a sharp, witty critic of macroeconomic models built around a single “representative agent” which he thought imposed tidy optimality on a messy world. He remained a Keynesian, and late in life he backed policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
A Jewish son of immigrants
Solow’s path follows a familiar arc of American Jewish history: immigrant grandparents, parents who had to give up schooling to work, a Depression-era childhood in Brooklyn, and children who reached the great universities through public schools and scholarships. That path was not free of obstacles. The Long Island scholarship refusal he attributed to antisemitism came at a time when elite American universities and their alumni networks still limited Jewish admissions. His wartime fluency in German, learned from a German refugee roommate, turned him into an eavesdropper on the German army in Italy.
He did not make religion a theme of his public life, and his Jewish background appears in his recollections chiefly as part of the texture of his upbringing and the barriers he met as a young man.
The teacher
Solow was famous for putting students first. He served as principal adviser to more than seventy doctoral students, and four of them, Peter Diamond, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz and William Nordhaus, went on to win Nobel Prizes; H. Robert Horvitz, who wrote an undergraduate economics thesis under him, won the Nobel in medicine. His undergraduate course was considered the highlight of MIT’s economics curriculum. He often lectured without notes, rewrote his material each year, and read student papers in the evenings across the living room from his wife. “I would rather teach a really bright student than write a mildly interesting paper” he told MIT News.
Colleagues described him as affable, funny and self-deprecating. He was a passionate sailor who kept a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. Barbara Solow, who earned her own Harvard doctorate and became a historian of Irish economic history and the Atlantic slave trade, died in 2014 after nearly seventy years of marriage. They had three children, John, Andrew and Katherine.
Later years and legacy
Solow retired from teaching in 1995, judging that the department would be better served by a younger scholar, but kept his office next to Samuelson’s and kept working, on macroeconomic theory with Frank Hahn, on the American boom of the late 1990s, and on low-wage work in the United States and Europe. He received the National Medal of Science and, in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Asked about retirement in a Harvard class report, he described it as the usual overactive kind: he still thought about economics, wrote about it a little, and cursed a lot when he read the newspaper.
He died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on December 21, 2023, at ninety-nine. His model is the first chapter of modern growth economics, and his central lesson, that the wealth of nations rests above all on knowledge and technological progress, now shapes how governments think about research, education and productivity everywhere.
Sources & further reading
Robert Solow, Wikipedia · Robert M. Solow, Biographical (NobelPrize.org) · Institute Professor Emeritus Robert Solow, pathbreaking economist, dies at age 99, MIT News · Robert M. Solow, celebrated economist and Nobel laureate, dies at 99, Boston Globe · Robert M. Solow, Infinite History oral history (MIT) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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