Biography
Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family on August 23, 1924, the oldest of three children. He was well educated in the neighborhood public schools of New York City and excelled academically early in life. In September 1940, Solow went to Harvard College with a scholarship at the age of 16. At Harvard, his first studies were in sociology and anthropology as well as elementary economics.
By the end of 1942, Solow left the university and joined the U.S. Army. He served briefly in North Africa and Sicily, and later served in Italy during World War II until he was discharged in August 1945.
He returned to Harvard in 1945, and studied under Wassily Leontief. As his research assistant he produced the first set of capital-coefficients for the input-output model. Then he became interested in statistics and probability models. From 1949–50, he spent a fellowship year at Columbia University to study statistics more intensively. During that year he was also working on his Ph.D. thesis, an exploratory attempt to model changes in the size distribution of wage income using interacting Markov processes for employment-unemployment and wage rates.
In 1949, just before going off to Columbia he was offered and accepted an Assistant Professorship in the Economics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At M.I.T. he taught courses in statistics and econometrics. Solow’s interest gradually changed to Macroeconomics. For almost 40 years, Solow and Paul Samuelson worked together on many landmark theories: von Neumann growth theory (1953), Theory of capital (1956), linear programming (1958) and the Phillips Curve (1960).
Solow also held several government positions, including senior economist for the Council 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's John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age forty. In 1979 he was president of that association.
In 1987, Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize for his analysis of economic growth.
In 1999, he received National Medal of Science.
Solow is Founder of the Cournot Foundation and Cournot Centre.
After the death of his colleague Franco Modigliani, he accepted to become the new Chairman of the I.S.E.O Institute, an Italian non profit cultural association which organizes international conferences and Summer Schools.
He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.
In 2011, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Science from Tufts University.
Several of his students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize including Peter Diamond, Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof.
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