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Robert Solow, the US economist who won the 1987 Nobel Prize for economics, has died. He was 99.
Solow won the most prestigious award in economics for his work on growth theory, with the model that bears his name becoming a staple of macroeconomics textbooks. The Solow model shows the role savings and investment play in generating stable growth over the long term.
He was also known for highlighting the role of technological innovation — and economies’ capacity to adapt to it — as the ultimate force behind sustained economic prosperity.
Solow spent most of his career as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. The MIT is expected to issue a statement later.
Paul Samuelson, the 1970 Nobel laureate whose office was located next door to his, described Solow as “the consummate economist’s economist”.
“He does everything well and with apparent ease,” Samuelson said in a 1989 piece for the Journal of Economic Perspectives. “People seek his advice not because they agree with his eclectic post-Keynesian ideology but because his knowledge and respect for evidence makes his long-run batting average useful to a Japanese mutual fund, a regional Federal Reserve Bank or scientific advisory committee of a major car producer.”
Solow was born in Brooklyn in August 1924, the oldest of three. A child of the Great Depression, he believed firmly in the role governments could play in protecting citizens from economic crises and served as an economist under the Kennedy Administration.
After winning a scholarship to Harvard in 1940, he first studied sociology and anthropology. He then took a break from his studies, serving as a soldier for three years during second world war, fighting in north Africa, Sicily and Italy, before returning to campus in 1945 and opting to focus on economics.
In the biographical note that accompanied his Nobel acceptance speech, Solow said his years in the army formed his character.
“I found myself part of a tight-knit group, doing a hard job with skill and mutual loyalty, led by one of the most remarkable men I have ever known, who never wavered from the path of humour and decency,” he said. “Twice again I have had similar experiences: in Walter Heller’s Council of Economic Advisers and, for most of my adult life, in the Economics Department at MIT. Day in and day out, that is the best sort of environment.”
During his time at MIT, he was a doctoral adviser to many students who would go on to become prominent scholars, among them future Nobel Laureates George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz.
Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank and Italian prime minister, also completed his doctorate under Solow and fellow MIT professor Franco Modigliani.
“Bob Solow was brilliant, generous and also hilarious,” Austan Goolsbee, Chicago Federal Reserve president, who studied at MIT under him, said on X. “He was the person every student wanted to be when they grew up. We will all miss his profound wisdom and humour. Goodbye old friend.”
Solow’s death was first reported by the New York Times, which confirmed his passing with his son, John.
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