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Robert Merton Solow

Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his analysis of economic growth. A Keynesian, Solow has been a witty critic of economists ranging from interventionists like Marxist economists and John Kenneth Galbraith to noninterventionist economists such as Milton Friedman. Solow once wrote that Galbraith’s disdain for ordinary consumer goods “reminds one of the Duchess who, upon acquiring a full appreciation of sex, asked the Duke if it were not perhaps too good for the common people.” Of Milton Friedman, Solow wrote, “Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.”

Solow earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he studied under Wassily Leontief, and has been an economics professor at MIT since 1950. From 1961 to 1963 he was a senior economist with President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors. In 1961 he won the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age 40. In 1979 he was president of that association.

—Courtesy of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

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