On Thursday, December 21, Robert M. Solow, professor emeritus at MIT, Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987 and one of the giants of economic science of the 20th century, died at the age of 99. XX.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Solow, who was six years old in 1930, called himself “a child of the Great Depression,” because “from 1930 to 1940, I was aware of the fact that almost the only thing they talked about was my parents was from the general insecurity of things, from the fact that you never knew where the next dollar would come from.” Solow located his interest in understanding the mechanisms of the economy in that early impact: “I have always felt, throughout my life, that if the economy provides security for people, that is as important as anything else.”
After attending school and public institute in New York, Solow entered Harvard University at the age of 16, but the Second World War crossed his path and at the beginning of the third year he decided to enlist in the army. In the middle of a class he realized that “I can’t spend 13 weeks here, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, taking notes on personality psychology when the most important thing that will happen in the rest of my life is happening in Europe, which is That is, the fight to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.” That’s how when he left class he enlisted and spent almost three years in Italy, in a unit that intercepted, translated and deciphered radio messages from the German army.
Upon returning from the war he married, completed his bachelor’s degree and doctorate, under the direction of Wassily Leontief – Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 1973. Already a doctor, Solow joined MIT and with the exception of 1960-61, which he spent at the White House working on President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, he spent his entire career at MIT. In fact, Solow and Paul Samuelson are the fathers of one of the most influential economics departments in the world. At MIT, Solow formed an immense list of disciples, four of whom have already won the Nobel Prize (P. Diamond, G. Akerlof, J. Stiglitz and W. Nordhaus).
Solow published in 1956 and 1957 the two articles that earned him the Nobel Prize and that constitute the origin of the modern study of economic growth. The “Solow model” shows that capital accumulation explains the growth of per capita income only in the short term, but not in the long term. In the long term, growth depends solely on advances in technology. Technical change—increased factor productivity—is necessary to overcome the law of diminishing returns to capital. In a second contribution, Solow showed how to empirically calculate total factor productivity growth from observable data: the difference between the growth rate of GDP and the growth rate of factors, capital and labor—“the residual of Solow.”
The new theories of endogenous growth, led by Paul Romer at the end of the eighties of the last century, are called theories of “endogenous technical change” or “economy of ideas”, because they precisely explain the technical change, which in the original work of Solow was still a black box.
Since its founding, Robert Solow was a member of the Academic Council of the Barcelona School of Economics and in 2008 he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Pompeu Fabra University.
