Growth/ Productivity/ Unemployment: Essays to Celebrate Bob Solow’s Birthday.

SOLOW, Robert. Edited by Peter Diamond.

$375.00

Item Number: 90367

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.

First edition of this collection of essays compiled to celebrate the Nobel Prize-winning economist’s birthday; signed by two Nobel Peace-prize winning economists. Signed by Robert Solow below his frontispiece portrait and editor Peter Diamond on the front free endpaper. Fine in a near fine dust jacket.

Robert Merton Solow is known for his work on the theory of economic growth that culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961), Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (in 1987) and the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Solow and colleague Paul Samuelson were responsible for MIT becoming the top ranked economics department. The MIT economists were thus growthmen in two senses: in seeing growth as an absolutely central policy imperative and in seeing the theory of growth as a focus for economic research. What the MIT growthmen added was a distinctive style of analysis that made it easier to address the dominant policy concerns in tractable formal models. Solow’s (1956) model was the perfect exemplar of the MIT style. It provided the central framework for the subsequent developments in growth theory and secured MIT as the center of the universe in the golden age of growth theory in the 1960s (Boianovsky and Hoover 199-200).