Robert Solow Quotations

Given the track record of the Bush administration, he's done all right by the Fed. But with these next two vacancies, I'd like to see him bring in some people with the capacity to think independently about economics.

Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with 'The Wealth of Nations'; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.

well-functioning markets have no innate tendency to promote excellence in any form. They offer no resistance to forces making for a descent into cultural barbarity or moral depravity.

We have fluctuations all the time, business cycles, and they come about in various ways, but normally what sets them off is some reduction in the willingness of our population, our businesses, and foreigners to buy.

Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.

The wealth-income ratio in the United States has always been lower than in Europe. The main reason in the early years was that land values bulked less in the wide open spaces of North America. There was, of course, much more land, but it was very cheap.

The key thing about wealth in a capitalist economy is that it reproduces itself and usually earns a positive net return.

infants typically toiled their way to an early death in the pits and mills of the Black Country.

Investors are worried that something is going to blow up tomorrow -- they just think it's a crazy world.

Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

The user of land should not be allowed to acquire rights of indefinite duration for single payments. For efficiency, for adequate revenue and for justice, every user of land should be required to make an annual payment to the local government equal to the current rental value of the land that he or she prevents others from using.

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.

I remember once reading that it is still not understood how the giraffe manages to pump an adequate blood supply all the way up to its head; but it is hard to imagine that anyone would conclude tht giraffes do not have long necks. At least not anyone who had ever been to a zoo

But part of the job of economics is weeding out errors. That is much harder than making them, but also more fun.

The fact that there is no such thing as a perfect anti-sepsis does not mean that one might as well do brain surgery in a sewer.

Computers show up everywhere except the growth statistics.

Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

There is not some glorious theoretical synthesis of capitalism that you can write down in a book and follow. You have to grope your way

If God had meant there to be more than two factors of production, He would have made it easier for us to draw three-dimension al diagrams.

It is a good idea to be ambitious, to have goals, to want to be good at what you do, but it is a terrible mistake to let drive and ambition get in the way of treating people with kindness and decency. The point is not that they will then be nice to you. It is that you will feel better about yourself.