I'm a little late to this sad news, but 1987 Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow passed away on 21 December last year. His name will be known to many students of introductory macroeconomics through the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model, developed independently in the 1950s by Solow and by Trevor Swan. The model is a mainstay of teaching in macroeconomics, and although it has long since been superseded by endogenous growth models, it still provides useful insights for students. Foremost among those insights is that technology (the so-called 'Solow residual' in a growth accounting model) is the driver of economic growth, rather than growth of labour or capital. I also found in my own teaching that students appreciated the model as providing an explanation for why growth rates in low-income countries most often exceed those in high-income countries.
Although I'm a microeconomist at heart, I have a fondness for Robert Solow's work. When I was an honours student, I wrote a long essay for my graduate macroeconomics class on growth theory. That essay received high praise from my lecturer and was a contributor to my decision to pursue a PhD in economics (although ironically, my PhD studies were in applied microeconomics, and I haven't really been involved in macroeconomic research ever since).
On a side note, we remain in a situation where no Nobel Prize winner in economics has celebrated a 100th birthday. Solow passed away aged 99, slightly younger than Maurice Allais was when he died in 2010. The oldest living Nobel Prize winner now is Vernon Smith, who turned 97 on 1 January.
For such an eminent economist, I'm surprised at an apparent lack of memorials across the blogosphere (perhaps the time of year has something to do with it). However, there are good obituaries at the New York Times, Washington Post, MIT News, and Time. As a read-through of those obituaries will tell you, Solow's contributions went beyond his own - he was the thesis advisor for four other Nobel Prize winners (Akerlof, Stiglitz, Diamond, and Nordhaus). Solow clearly made his mark on the discipline of economics. He will be missed.
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