Robert M Solow

December 26, 2023

Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987, died recently. He was 99.
He won the prize for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United States.
Solow taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and a fellow Nobel laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, forged the MIT style of economic analysis, which emerged as a leading approach in the second half of the 20th century and played an important role in economic policymaking.
His work demonstrated the power of bringing mathematics to bear on important economic debates and simplifying the analysis by focusing on a small number of variables at a time.