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This chapter presents a dialog between two of the most important macroeconomists of the past half century: Robert M. Solow and John B. Taylor. Among the questions asked was what Solow thought about the Phillips curve when he first saw it and what it was like then; and what the academic thinking on the Phillips curve looked like when Taylor started grad school back in the 1960s.

This chapter presents a commentary by Robert Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He discusses two questions that arose in his mind as he was listening to the lecture. The first is that it would take a lot of abstemiousness on the part of the rest of the world to accept broad tariff protection in developing countries while at the same time remaining open to exports from those same countries. The second question is: How do you prevent broad tariff protection from leading to rent-seeking and laziness? It also asks: Where do the incentives come from to use the broad protection to be given the infant economy in order to achieve higher productivity, learning, improvement in technology, and rapid growth instead of dissipating it in the collection and consolidation of rents?

There has been much debate on whether economic growth and globalization facilitate or impede progress against poverty and inequality. A long-standing, and widely held, view is that economic growth in a capitalist economy is bound to be inequitable, and even poverty-increasing. This pessimistic assessment persists, including in development circles, although economic thinking in the twentieth century has provided a more qualified and positive view. The continuing debates about how much poor people benefit from aggregate economic growth have been informed by various economic theories about growth and distributional change. This chapter discusses these theories, reviewing the contributions made by Simon Kuznets, Frank Ramsey, Arthur Lewis, Robert Solow, Thomas Piketty and others. The chapter then reviews the evidence, including new data. The chapter concludes with case studies for China, India and Brazil.

This chapter presents introductory remarks from Michael Woodford, John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy, before the first Arrow Lecture at Columbia University. Woodford begins by citing some of Kenneth Arrow's fundamental contributions to economic theory. He then introduces the economists participating in the discussion that took place after the lecture. These include Joseph Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University, with appointments in the Business School, the Department of Economics, and the School of international and Public Affairs; Bruce Greenwald, Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management at Columbia's Graduate School of Business; Philippe Aghion, Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Robert Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus from MIT.

This chapter discusses four distinct processes of economic growth: a) Solovian growth, in honor of Robert Solow; b) Smithian growth, Adam Smith's mechanism of growth; c) scale or size effects, which maintained that population growth itself can lead to per capita income growth; and Schumpeterian growth, by Joseph A. Schumpeter. It focuses on the Schumpeterian form of economic growth, which usually accompanies technological change. The chapter discusses technological change dealing with other forms of economic growth only insofar as they touch upon technological change directly. It points out that technological creativity is analyzed largely as a social, rather than an individual, phenomenon. The chapter focuses on why there were, and whether there still are, societies that have more creative individuals in them than others, and discusses the question that lies at the foundation of the issue of issues: Why does economic growth (at least of the Schumpeterian type) occur in some societies and not others?

Economists have made countless efforts to understand Robert Solow's productivity paradox wherein computers have somehow become present in several different aspects except in the productivity statistics since evidence has yet to be derived from empirical studies that suggest the link between productivity growth and investing in information technology (IT). However, some studies have found important links which involve how the information and communications technology sector plays no small part in terms of R&D endeavours, and that the leading industrial countries have allocated much of their resources to R&D because this entails significant returns. This chapter aims to examine the empirical findings regarding R&D spillovers in the international scene, specifically the ones which concern IT and the spillovers from developed to developing countries.

This chapter reviews the origins and evolution of growth theory, showing how theory has responded to, and often been surprised by, global events, and how the writings of economic historians have often anticipated theoretical advances. It begins with the seminal work of Robert Solow, which shifted the attention of economists from labor productivity to total factor productivity as the principal measure of changes in economic efficiency or technological change. The chapter then compares the work of Zvi Griliches, Richard Nelson, and Dale W. Jorgenson, whose research on technological change spanned the period from the mid-1950s to the present. This is followed by discussions of the economic historians who wrote about changes in patterns of U.S. economic growth, and the impact of the Asian Miracle on growth theory.

This chapter looks at the work of Robert M. Solow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987. Solow was born in 1924 and recieved his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.from Harvard University. He started out serving as assistant and associative professor of statistics. He was then appointed as professor of economics. He progressed to become institute professor and institute professor, emeritus, both at MIT. His doctorate thesis presented a model on the dynamics of the size distribution of incomes as the outcome of a random process of employment in terms of changes in wage levels. He also developed his own version of growth theory encompassing capital-theoretic overtones. Among his titles are Linear Programming and Economic Analysis and Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory.

The importance of human capital for economic growth was highlighted in much of the “new growth theory” that came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The neoclassical growth model, formalized three decades earlier, had focused on the accumulation of machinery and equipment and emphasized the feature of diminishing returns—which implied that such investment would not be able to drive long-run growth. The new generation of studies switched attention to the accumulation of human capital and the possibility that returns to investment in education, training, and research may not suffer from diminishing returns. This chapter examines market-related returns to human capital, focusing on the experience of Australia. It reviews and evaluates evidence from recent theoretical and econometric studies relating economic growth to investment in both embodied and disembodied human capital. The chapter focuses on the empirical front to the relatively well-documented areas of investment in formal schooling and research and development. It also discusses the role of knowledge in economic growth, endogenous growth theory, the ideas of Robert Solow, and Australia's educational attainment report.

Chapter 5 chronicles my doctoral program at MIT, where I’m a token woman and an “honorary man” starved for female companionship. I discuss several of my professors: Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Evsey Domar. I review my decision to conceal my pregnancy when I go on the job market and its ultimate revelation several months later. I contrast my career and marriage to Alice’s (she also has a Ph.D. in economics), and try to understand why I never ask Sam to do any housework. I discuss my difficult experience giving birth at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and my subsequent post-partum depression, which lifts instantly when I find a caretaker for my very young son (by far the scariest thing I have ever done) and begin teaching at the University of Maryland. I describe my elation at completing my doctoral thesis and becoming an assistant professor at Maryland, and compare my ability to speak out and improve the situation during my second birth to my sense of powerlessness during my first. I discuss the mentorship provided to me by Barbara Bergmann.The chapter ends with moving to California and finding a job as a lecturer at Berkeley.