Robert M. Solow

INTERVIEWER: This is the MIT150 Oral History Project. The date is August 15, 2007. Brian Keegan is interviewing professor Robert Solow. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. We just want to start off and go over biographical background before we get to your more academic accomplishments and your reflections. So I thought that maybe we'll start right from the beginning-- tell me about where you grew up, what you were like as a child, and what your parents did.

SOLOW: Well, I was born in and grew up in Brooklyn, New York which was one time a favorite-- it would bring a laugh from an audience, if I said I came from Brooklyn. But I did, in 1924, and I stayed there until I came to college 16 years later. We were a sort of lower- middle class family. My father was in the fur business. And the only piece of occupational advice he ever gave me was to say once, you know, Bob, I don't care what you do with your life, but if you go into the fur business, I'll kill you. So I didn't go into the fur business.

And I was a perfectly normal middle class kid. Played ball a lot, hung out with my friends, we lived-- it was a nice neighborhood. Always good in school, from the very beginning I got good grades and got them easily, liked to read. But given a choice between reading and playing stick ball or softball or football or whatever, I would choose the games any time. And I had two sisters, both younger than I. And I guess the only other important thing to say is that my mother and father, I think of as having been extremely intelligent people, but neither of them went beyond high school. They could not afford it. They had to go to work as soon as they got out of high school. But that they had the capacity to do a lot more, both of them, I have no doubt at all. So all you have there is a normal urban childhood in a lower- middle class part of Brooklyn. I went to the local public school, elementary school, PS 197, it was called through sixth grade.

Then I transferred to a junior high school-- a little different from what a junior high or middle school would be now. It was a distance away, so I had to take a bus. Not a school bus, just a regular bus, on the street for a nickel to and from school. But it ran-- it did seventh, eighth, and ninth grades in two years. So it was sort of a selective school. And I got through ninth grade there, and then went to the local high school-- James Madison High School, which was no more than a 1/4 mile from where we lived. And graduated from Madison when I was 16.

I had skipped a couple of grades in elementary school-- I learned to read at a very, very early age, not being taught. I don't have any recollection of my parents trying to get me to read, but I was curious, I guess, and so I could probably read by the time I was four- years- old or something like that. And so I got out with the three times-- grades I skipped in grade school-- and extra year saved at junior high school, instead of graduating from high school at 18, I graduated at 16.

INTERVIEWER: Now did the Great Depression-- how did that affect your family or growing up? Was it particularly onerous?

SOLOW: It was an important thing in my life and probably has a lot to do with attitudes I have, even now. My father was never unemployed for any length of time-- he always made a living. And we didn't live in any hardship at all. But, as a kid, say from the age of eight on, I was conscious of the fact that all my parents did in their free time was worry. And their worries were purely economic, what was going to happen? Could they continue to make ends meet in a satisfactory way? They talked about it lot, and I could overhear them talking about it with their friends, and so I was very much aware, even as a kid, that something bad had happened and that it was called the Depression. And it meant that there were a lot of people out of work and a lot of people were poor and hungry, and that stuck with me.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any memories of FDR and his fireside chats? Or talk about economic issues?

SOLOW: I have clear recollection of-- in fact I even have some recollection of the election of 1928, when I would have been four years old-- because I remember the name Al Smith who was the Democratic candidate and lost the election to Herbert Hoover. But when it came to 1932 and the first Roosevelt election, we were very aware of Roosevelt. I heard his voice on the radio. I'm not sure that I listened to the early fireside chats because I might have been in bed by the time that those came on. But Roosevelt was a hero to my parents and their friends and we, I mean I and my friends in the neighborhood, were completely aware of him. We knew his voice, we heard speeches occasionally, and we knew that he was trying to lick the Depression.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your scholarship to Harvard, or how you came to go to Harvard.

SOLOW: I've said that I graduated from high school at 16. In my last year there, my senior year there, a person who was of considerable importance in my life was a teacher I had. Her name was Mrs. Towster and she and her husband sort of befriended me. She taught a wonderful elective course for seniors at Madison High School in which we read great novels. We read-- we started with Candide by Voltaire. We read a Balzac novel, we read Stendhal, we read Flaubert, Madame Bovary, we read Turgenev and Tolstoy. And I think that was the first experience I'd ever had when I was interested in something for purely intellectual reasons. I said I always got A's school, but I didn't care about it. I did it because it came easily to me and there was no reason not to do it. But that course and Mrs. Towster and her husband got me interested in classical music for the first time, I'd never heard anything like that. And there was-- I spent a lot of time with them after school, and they were always talking about serious things. I guess that was the first really intellectual experience I'd ever had.

So, here I am getting out of high school at the age of 16. And I sort of took it for granted as an act of nature that I would go to Brooklyn College, which was the branch of the City College-- City University of New York in Brooklyn, not far from where I lived. And there were no guidance counselors or anything like that at the school. I might mention that Madison High School when I went to it had 10,000 students. It was not a small institution. It was in two sessions-- you win either from 8:00 to 1:00 or from 1:00 to 6:00. Freshmen and sophomores at one time, juniors and seniors at another-- I don't remember which was which. But I just sort of took it as hardly a decision, I would go to Brooklyn College. And that teacher, Mrs. Towster she said nope, you should apply for some scholarships. You should-- you can get a Regents Scholarship from New York, there are a lot of those-- New York State, I mean. And you should apply to Columbia and you should apply to Harvard. I think those are the only two she mentioned. So I did it. And I got-- actually, there's another thing worth saying.

There was a scholarship offered by the Harvard Club of Long Island. If you know your geography, you know that Brooklyn is actually part of an island called Long Island. And I applied for that and it was a nice scholarship-- just for one year, freshman year. And I was interviewed and I was turned down. And it was pretty clear from the context that I was being turned down because I was Jewish. There was-- I remember one of them asking some sort of unkind question. And I don't remember what I would have said, but I didn't get that and I'm pretty sure that's why.

There was also a Harvard Club of New York Scholarship that I had applied for, and that I got. And it was worth $600 for one year. Tuition at Harvard was $400 and $200 would almost pay for room and board. And so I went. And actually, I managed to support myself totally. I don't-- from the age of 16 on, I've been, I was totally self-supporting. Never took a dollar from my mother and father-- I didn't want to. I had two younger sisters that had to go to college. There wasn't a lot of money to go around, as I said. I figured they'd need it. Also, I had this feeling that if I was getting money from home, then I would be a little bit under the control of my parents. And I think from probably-- I don't know at what age, but a very early age long before that, I was very independent. Never wanted anybody to tell me what to do, I liked to do it myself.

So I went to Harvard College, age 16. I had this $600 scholarship. I got a part time job to fill out the rest of the money and just went. I got straight A's in my freshman year and so my scholarship was reduced from $600 to $400 because it was no longer on the Harvard Club of New York but on Harvard University. So, I got a second job and was still able to support myself. I worked in one of the libraries and I was a busboy in a restaurant in Harvard Square. And the truth of the matter is, I never-- didn't have the any trouble getting A's in those courses. It just came easy. So I did.

INTERVIEWER: So you entered Harvard in the fall of 1940. This is obviously, the war in Europe had already increased in tempo by then. But maybe you could tell me about your awareness of the events going on in Europe were or America's coming involvement.

SOLOW: Yeah, that's sort of interesting. I knew about the war, of course. I was interested in politics, as were most of the people I knew both at home and at Harvard College. And we knew about Hitler and all that. But I have to say, I know exactly where I was when I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was in-- so this would have been in December '41-- I was already a sophomore. I was in taking a course in psychology with a professor named Henry Murray in a small building at Harvard Square and I was sitting there. And it must have been December 7 or 8 of 1941 and we heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. That came as a total surprise. I hadn't really thought much about whether the U.S. would end up in the war in Europe. I was certainly not an isolationist at that time-- or ever-- but I don't think that it preoccupied me or my contemporaries then. So this Pearl Harbor came as a shock. And then from that time on, of course, we knew that we were going to be involved in Europe. We weren't just going to fight Japan alone. So from that point on, the war was a really very important thing. And I decided very soon after that-- maybe at about that time-- that I was going to join the Army. I was going to volunteer for the Army. And I've never been sure exactly why-- it was for two reasons I suppose. One reason was that I really was conscious of the fact that Hitler had to be beaten. I was like a lot of my contemporaries then, sort of left wing. Never a communist, actually, never remotely. But on the left, definitely, and I knew that Hitler had to go and if Hitler had to go, I wanted to be part of it. And the second reason was, I think I was bored out of my brains at Harvard College and I needed to do something else.

So I-- at some point, I don't know exactly when-- probably in the spring of 1942-- I volunteered, I joined the Army. And I was told that I would be inducted sometime toward the end of 1942. Why that time lapse, I don't know. But that's what I did.

INTERVIEWER: Did it ever pass through your mind that you could have gotten a deferment? Or served stateside?

SOLOW: Oh, I knew that--

INTERVIEWER: Or, you wanted to be in Europe?

SOLOW: I knew that perfectly well because even after the draft was instituted, I knew that most of my friends-- not all, but probably the majority of the people I knew at Harvard-- were going to get some kind of deferment. There were various programs you could join with names like V-12 or something like that, which were in effect a glorified ROTC and meant that you would be able to finish college or at least go on for two years or three years without actually being in the service. And I definitely did not want to do that.

INTERVIEWER: So you served in the Italian campaign. Tell me what you were involved in.

SOLOW: Well actually, it was very interesting. One of the things that I suppose rarely happens in the Army. After I was actually inducted and I was at Fort Devens, not far from Boston, which was the induction center. I knew two things amongst other-- there were two minor skills I had picked up. One skill, I knew German. I could speak German pretty fluently, actually. Because when I came to Harvard in September 1940, my randomly assigned roommate was a German refugee, Gerhard Nellhaus. And I was just clever enough to say to myself, this is a good opportunity. You're going to take elementary German as one of your freshman courses and you're going to have Gerhard to talk to at night and evening and you can learn German pretty well that way. And so I did. And by-- after two years, by the end of my sophomore year-- in June '42, I was practically fluent in German. So I had that skill.

Also, I knew Morse code. Because at some point, the psychology department at Harvard had some kind of contract with the military to improve the teaching of Morse code, to train radio operators. And so there was an ad somewhere that if you came twice a week in the basement of Memorial Hall as a guinea pig for this, you could learn Morse code. That struck me as a cool thing to do, so I did it. And I was pretty good at Morse code.

So here I am, I know German and I know Morse code. And I get assigned-- ta- da, I mean this hardly ever happens-- to a signal intelligence, a radio intelligence unit, whose job-- I don't know if anybody does this anymore-- whose job was to listen to very low level German radio traffic. I don't mean, not like, bright people did in England and break codes at very high level. This was platoon headquarters, to company headquarters, company headquarters to battalion, battalion to regiment. I don't think we ever listened to traffic from any unit bigger than a regimental headquarters.

In order to do this, you had-- it was, these were the early days, by the way, there were-- it was line of sight. You could not hear what you could not see. Now you didn't have to be as far from me as I am from you. Signal would carry a distance. But almost any obstacle would block it. So we-- after we learned our trade-- our job was to find a place as close to the Germans as we could manage without being overexposed. Because we had to do this stuff in a completely closed-in truck. Which had eight or nine radios operating and a place for people like me-- I'll tell you about that in a second. And so, if we were clearly visible, we're dead. So what usually-- the idea was to get just behind the brow of a hill with the Germans on the other side and so you could poke an antenna up over the hill. And they would send this traffic sometimes in plain language, but more often in elementary codes. And my particular job, along with some others, was to try to break those codes in real time. They were very simple codes, but you had to understand them very soon because a message might say, you're going to get a delivery of machine gun ammunition at such and such a map coordinate at 7 o'clock this evening. And if the message came at noon, it had to be read or else it was useless. But more often than not, we were able to crack those codes and read them, and the delivery of machine gun ammunition would be met with a fighter- bomber or some mortar or whatever. And score one for our side. So I did that for-- in Italy, for two years. And from the bottom of Italy to the top, actually. And we were a very successful unit. We were cited by the Corps' headquarters or whatever a couple of times. We were very, very good at it, I have to say. And it was also a marvelous experience for me.

First of all, it was dangerous enough so I didn't feel like I was sitting out the war in comfort. But it wasn't like being a rifleman-- I had an excellent chance of surviving. So I didn't have the guilt of being safe, but I had a little bit of-- a good shot. And it was a small group-- a company of about 120 men doing various functions and extremely well led. And since it was successful, doing good, there was very high morale. And we were buddies. And I just enjoyed that. I must have been the youngest person in the unit since I was-- I started off, I was well before my 19th birthday. And these were, I thought, terrific guys. And they were not all college students. Most of them were-- the radio operators themselves, the guys who could do Morse code very fast and with a lot of noise-- most of those were high school graduates, if that. The drivers, the men who laid wire, all that. So I got to be a very close friend with a cross section of people. And I liked that a lot.

And I also acquired a real taste for small high morale groups doing a job. And the MIT economics department is a prize example of that for me. It was the same sort of feeling although, of course, the personnel was a little different. So, we worked our way from the bottom of Italy up to the top when the Germans surrendered in May 1945.

INTERVIEWER: Now you refused any promotion beyond the rank of sergeant, is that correct?

SOLOW: I got to be technical sergeant-- and if the war had lasted another few months, I'd have made master sergeant, but I'm just as glad it didn't. I could have had a commission at one point. My company commander was a marvelous man-- died a few years ago, we stayed friends until he died. He offered to-- he wanted to put me up for a battlefield commission-- make me a second lieutenant. And I thought about it for about 30 seconds and said, gee no, I don't want to do that. I can remember pretty clearly what went through my mind was that if I became an officer, I'd have two choices. I could stay in the unit, in which case my relationship with all these guys who were my buddies would change. They would be supposed to say, Sir. The alternative was to join another unit. I didn't want to do that either. So I said no, no thanks. I'll just stick it out where I am. And so I got my promotions and I was a high-ranking non-com.

INTERVIEWER: Now you were discharged in August 1945 and you decided to return to Harvard. And tell me how you finished out your last couple years at Harvard and what made you decide to pursue economics?

SOLOW: That's a funny story, too. At Harvard, before I left, in 1942 I was in, I had finished a fraction of my junior year before I was actually in the Army, probably in November '42, something like that. I had gone to Harvard College-- if I had any thought at all about what I would study, it was botany.

Why botany? Because I had heard that there were jobs to be had in the Forest Service. This was 1940, the Depression was not really yet over. The unemployment rate in the US 1940 was about 14 percent. And being able to have a job was a very important thing. And someone told me there were always jobs in the US Forest Service. And I said, well, then maybe I'll study botany and I'll be a prize pick up for the Forest Service. But I took a biology course my freshman year-- and I got an A in it-- but I knew it was not for me. I really couldn't do it. I was just not good at it. I could master it, but it was clearly not right for me.

So I didn't know what to do. And they had a sort of catch-all major at Harvard then called the Area of the Social Sciences. And I said, that I and all my contemporaries knew that our society had broken down pretty badly. Meaning not just American society, but on a wider scale than that. The Depression had made a deep impression on me, and the coming of Hitler and the Nazis and the war was yet another sign that society wasn't functioning very well. And so, it seemed to me very important to learn something about how society works. And maybe be able to do some good about it. So I signed up for this Area of Social Sciences thing and I pursued it for the rest of my time until 1942. And I had a couple courses in economics, I had a course in political science, took some sociology, took some anthropology. Was able to go amongst all the social sciences-- and the variety was nice.

Then I go to the Army, I'm in the Army for just about three years-- a few months short of three years. And I come out-- I get home in July of 1945. And the first thing I do is get married because I had a girl and we'd been writing letters to one another. As she always says, her father must have near died. Here's this guy she had known for maybe six months or something like that back in Cambridge, Mass. And he goes away for three years and then comes back and seven days later-- which was the time it took to get it done-- we were married. But we got married, we've been married for 62 years now, so it must have been okay. And we were on our honeymoon, we decided to have-- I was still in the Army. I'd come back in July and I got a-- I can't remember, a 30 day leave or-- everyone did. I had a leave, I got my-- I was still in uniform. I was still in the Army.

And at that time, for all I knew, I'd be heading back-- heading off to Japan. This was before-- oh, I have to tell you. That on the troop ship, coming back from Naples to Newport News, Virginia this would have been toward the-- well the date will come out, I don't remember the exact date, but we'll know. This is a, like, seven or eight days on a troop ship, heading back. We were all fully expecting to have our month's leave and then get shipped off to Japan. We heard over the boat's-- the ship's-- PA system, the news of the Hiroshima bomb. And we all cheered. There's this ship chock-a-block with returning-- with guys like me-- and we cheered. And I have never held it against Harry Truman for a second that he dropped that bomb.

So by that time-- by the time we landed, it was probable that the war was going to end. I remember hearing on the radio the announcement that Japan had surrendered. But anyhow we-- so Bobby and I got married, and we thought we'd have a honeymoon before I had to go back to Fort Dix. And so we were going out on the Cape somewhere, on Cape Cod. Falmouth, I think. And we got as far as Cambridge and had to spend the night in Cambridge-- or in Boston-- to get a bus the next morning. And we stayed in a little inn near Harvard Square. I do remember-- boy, how times have changed-- we showed up to stay at that inn and, you know, we're 21 years old and I'm in uniform. And the innkeeper wanted to see a marriage certificate. He wouldn't contemplate renting a room for a night to some soldier and a broad-- they might not even be married. Fortunately, I had a marriage certificate-- we'd been married the day before.

So we were staying in that inn, and we were listening to the radio. And they announced the point system for discharges very soon after the Japanese surrendered. You got a point for every month you were in the service, you got an extra five points or one point for every month you'd been in a combat zone. You got five points for this, five points for that, and if it added up to 85 points, you were immediately eligible for discharge. So I'm sitting there adding, and finally it added up, and I said, I'm out.

And there I am near Harvard Square, it's-- we were married on the 19th of August. So it must have been the 20th or 21st of August, and I figure, I've got to go back to school in September, I'm going to be discharged right away. And so then I figure I'd better go tell them that. And then, I had to decide what I was going to study. And I didn't know. So I said to my wife, now you were an economics major. Was it interesting? And she said, yeah, it was very interesting. So I said, all right. We'll give it a try. And I went over to the economics department and told them I was coming back in September. And that's how I became an economist.

Now the interesting story is how my wife decided to study economics. She was a Radcliffe student and she was taking-- she was, I think, a literature or an English major, something like that. And she was taking a course, and one of the books they had to read was a novel by Charles Dickens. Bleak House, maybe. And she hadn't read it and she had a paper due the next day. So in her dormitory, she asked if any of the girls had read Bleak House, and one of them had. She said, tell me the story, tell me the plot. Girl told her the plot. She went up to her room, wrote the paper, turned it in the next morning, and got a B+. And she said to herself, there's got to be something wrong with a subject when you can get a B+ on a paper under those circumstances. So she did economics. And that's how I became an economist. And I came back in September '45-- we came back-- and I had to finish my undergraduate degree. And then naturally, go on to graduate school.

INTERVIEWER: What compelled you to attend graduate school? Was it a natural progression that you had--?

SOLOW: Well, yeah I did very well. If I have any talent at all, it's for getting high grades in courses. I did very well, I liked it, it was interesting. It was really quite fascinating. But then I graduated, in 1947 or something-- yeah, I had two more years to go-- in 1947. Had to decide what to do next. So I consulted my wife and she said, I think you ought to go to graduate school. And I said, well, I will if you will. So we both registered for a PhD in economics. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. I was enjoying it. And so that takes me through graduate school.

INTERVIEWER: What was the intellectual climate like?

SOLOW: It was actually-- it had pluses and minuses. This was the beginnings of the flood of returning veterans with the GI Bill-- that's how we paid for it. It meant that the university was jam-packed with students. But they were very good. These were guys-- most of them had graduated and then been in the service-- whether like me as a volunteer or just as a draftee. And it was now two, three years later. And they were more mature than your basic graduate student is-- they were older and they had seen a little more of life, at least military life. And they were in a hurry. They knew they were older than they would have been-- for many of them like me, two or three years out of your life. So they were dead serious about getting their degrees.

And so the atmosphere was really very good although it was very crowded. And it meant that on the whole you didn't get a lot of quality time with the faculty. I did, actually, by good fortune. While I was still an undergraduate, I had come to know Wassily Leontief, who was a professor of economics at Harvard. And because every junior or senior-- at least senior, and I think junior and senior-- had what was called a tutor and you were supposed to meet with them once a week and he'd give you something to read and then talk about it the next week. And as luck would have it-- probably wasn't luck, it was probably the fact that they knew perfectly well that I had been a straight-A student when I was-- in '40, '41, '42. And so they assigned me to a good person. And Wassily was a wonderful teacher and he did a marvelous thing for me. I had, at that stage, never taken a college level course in mathematics. I was extremely good in high school math, but I just had no reason to go on with it, and didn't. And Wassily Leontief would say to me-- well, here's an interesting thing for you to read. But no, you can't read that because you don't have any mathematics to speak of. So why don't you read this other thing instead?

Well, it took only two weeks like that and I figured, I want to read the good stuff. So I started with elementary calculus and did the whole bit. And that was an enormous favor that Wassily did for me. So it was-- but then I was lucky as a graduate student even in those crowded days I believe the number that sticks in my mind that there was something like 280 graduate students in economics at Harvard, in those years from '47 to '49. That's an enormous number. And the courses were all packed. But I was lucky since I knew Wassily Leontief, and he knew me. And I worked as his research assistant part-time, and so I had a very good education there.

INTERVIEWER: What was your dissertation on? In lay or so many words?

SOLOW: I got interested in the size distribution of income. You know if you array annual incomes of families, or individuals, in a country like the US, you get not exactly a standard bell curve. But you get a skewed bell curve with a long tail on the right. There is a very small number of very high incomes. And then as you go to lower and lower incomes, a bigger and bigger fraction of the families earn that much. But then eventually it reaches a peak. And then there's a fairly sharp decline as you go to very low incomes.

And I was interested in studying that. And studying the process that gives rise to that. And I was also influenced by the fact that having come just fairly new to any kind of serious college level study of math, I had learned probability and statistics. And I was fascinated by probability. So I thought maybe I could use what I have learned about probability to study how this frequency distribution gets formed. And so that's what I did. I wrote a thesis on the dynamic process that gives rise to this not bell-shaped curve for incomes. And how it varies from year to year. And how an individual family travels through the income distribution. You know, there's a normal age thing. You get started at a lower income, get higher incomes as you get older. And so on. And that's the kind of thing I did. It was actually-- I didn't realize it at the time --but it was a very new thing to do. I don't think anybody had used those mathematical probability tools, stochastic process tools, in economics until then.

INTERVIEWER: Now, you were finishing up here your PhD when Paul Samuelson published his famous paper, Fundamentals of Economic Analysis. How aware were you of Paul Samuelson before MIT or his work?

SOLOW: I knew Samuelson's name and I had read some of his well known papers. I think that the Foundations of Economic Analysis came out just about the time I was finishing my graduate work. And I gobbled it up. There weren't many of us in that large crowd at Harvard who were doing this kind of mathematical theory. But those of us who were just grabbed it, and it was like nothing we'd ever seen before. The standard book, if you were, when I was a graduate student, if you were doing some mathematical economics was a book by an Englishman named John R Hicks called Value and Capital that had a mathematical appendix. So we learned a lot from that mathematical appendix. But the Samuelson foundations were so superior, so much clearer, so much better, so much deeper, in getting at the essence of economic theory that it made a big difference to my generation of people.

INTERVIEWER: What had you heard of MIT economics, or just MIT in general when you were a graduate student at Harvard?

SOLOW: Nothing! I knew absolutely nothing. I was totally ignorant about things like that. But in those days-- this would be like 1949. In those days it was not rare for someone like me who had finished his course work but had not yet finished the PhD thesis to be appointed an assistant professor in a decent department. But I had no idea what the decent departments were, or what to do. The only place I knew, the only academic place I knew was Harvard. Harvard wasn't much interested in me. It wasn't much interested in people who did theory mathematically. All I knew was that I had a telephone call or letter, I don't remember which, almost certainly from Harold Freeman at MIT asking if I might be interested in a job. You only had to ask me that question, and the answer was, "Yes." But I knew nothing about the place. I mean, I knew what it was. I knew there was this reputation of nerdy students and no girls. And all that. But I didn't know anything about it at all. But I sure was interested in the job, especially since I wasn't going to be offered anything worth having at Harvard.

So I went over to the interview. And I met a lot of the people. I suppose that must have been the first time I ever met Paul Samuelson face to face. I might have heard him give a talk or something like that. But I met Harold Freeman. I met Ralph Freeman who was the head of the department then. And I met a couple of the other faculty. And they seemed to be interested in me. I must have had very good recommendations from my teachers at Harvard. From Leontief, from Sidney Alexander, from any number of people. I remember that Ralph Freeman said to me, well what sort of salary were you thinking of? And, you know I'm very sophisticated. I said to him, this is part of the legend I guess. I said, what's the lowest salary you pay assistant professors? And he said $4,400. And I said, that sounds pretty good to me. So I was hired for $4,400 a year, which was more money than I had ever thought of in one place at one time. So I grabbed it.

And of course, at that time most of my teaching was in statistics. Because I said, I'd written this probabilistic thesis. Oh! This is part of the story. I had also put in, when I finished my exams at Harvard, I had put in for a Ford Foundation Thesis Writing Fellowship. They had them then. And if you won one of these, they would cover all your expenses for one year while you wrote a PhD thesis. And I wanted to do probability and statistics. Harvard had zilch in probability and statistics. There were one or two decent courses taught by a guy named Fred Mosteller a well known statistician, died a couple years ago. I had taken those. And he had done a reading course for me to teach me something. And then he said, look if you want to learn more statistics, you should go to some university that takes it seriously. And the two possibilities were Columbia and Berkeley. So I got this Ford Foundation Fellowship for a year. My wife got a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for that year. And I decided to go to Columbia, spend a year at Columbia, which had an excellent mathematical statistics department.

And I spent half my time writing my thesis, and the other half of my time taking courses in mathematical statistics. But I had already got the job at MIT. I said I want to take my first year on unpaid leave. I have the finance, and I'm going to make a really good statistician out of myself. And they were willing to do that. So I went off to Columbia, did that just for a year. And when I came back and started teaching in the fall of 1950, that would be, most of my teaching was statistics. I taught elementary statistics for all of MIT, because MIT was almost as bad at statistics as Harvard. They couldn't be as bad, because Harvard was as bad as it gets. But MIT had little or nothing. And the elementary statistics courses that I taught were taken by undergraduate from all over the Institute. And some graduate students as well. And I also taught specialized graduate courses in statistical methods for the economics graduate students. And I only sort of gradually began shifting over to teach economics. I never lost my interest in it.

INTERVIEWER: What were your initial impressions about campus? How did it match your expectations? Was there anything that struck you about the campus, or the atmosphere when you arrived?

SOLOW: Well, of course it was very different from Harvard. Of course even Harvard is not like Williams or something like that. It's not your idyllic grass and rolling hills. But the main building at MIT, the great Mausoleum that creates a great impression, the first time you see it. I've never been in a place where you could walk from one end to the other indoors like that. I liked the students instantly. I thought they were just terrific. They were a little nerdish in those days. And there were almost no girls. But MIT students first of all had no affectations. They were who they were. They had an enormous appetite for work. And they were good humored about it.

I'll tell you something about the girl business. As the junior member of the department of course, I got all the scut work to do. That happens all the time. And one of my jobs was being the person an undergraduate came to see if they wanted to change their major. If they wanted to, in particular, come and be a major in the then-called Department of Economics and Social Science, because there was some psychology and there was some political science. And it was all wrapped up into this one department. But I was the new assistant professor, so anyone who wanted to major in course 14 came to see me. And there was a not large, but fairly steady flow of people like that.

It soon occurred to me that I was getting quite a few girls. And then it occurred to me that the girls all had names like Phillippa or Georgia or Wilhemina. Then I would discover typically that they were only children, and their fathers were MIT alumni. And then it became clear, the father says to himself, all I've got is this girl. But at least I can make an engineer out of her. And he'd ship her off to MIT. She was named Georgia or Phillipa, half as if she were a boy. And they'd ship her off, and the poor woman would be registered in mechanical or electrical or civil or what have you. By the time she got to the middle of her sophomore year, she'd say to herself, I don't have to do this. And what else could you do? If you didn't want to be an engineering or science major, the only thing you could do was come to Course 14. So these were very bright young women. But it's not like that anymore. It has changed. In a way, that's the biggest single change at MIT in those 50 years, the role of women in the student body.

INTERVIEWER: Where was your office?

SOLOW: I was in Building 14, which is the office building right back of Dewey Library. And I don't remember the number anymore, but I remember the office. It was right next to the elevator and stairwell. And across from Paul's office, across from Samuelson's office. And we shared a secretary, Gloria Wiggin. And that began our friendship.

INTERVIEWER: Who else was in the department when you arrived?

SOLOW: It was much smaller than it is now. Bob Bishop was in the department. And Cary Brown was in the department. And if I remember correctly Morris Adelman was in the department. And Ralph and Harold Freeman. Harold Freeman was the statistician. Harold Freeman had been the only teacher of statistics and practically the only teacher of statistics at MIT, before I got there. So once I got there, we were able to divide up to work. And he could stick to the things he was most interested in, which included industrial statistics, quality control, product testing and things of that sort. And I could do the kind of thing that had more application to science and to economics. And Ralph Freeman who was the head of the department and had been for a long time, was really, very, very good at it. He was very understanding, knowledgeable. Not so much about economics but knowledgeable about MIT. And what people needed. And he regarded it as his job to make the department function well and be happy. And he succeeded.

INTERVIEWER: You've already mentioned that you hadn't thought that there was any other job. Once you got the call from MIT, that there was no other job. Once you had started establishing yourself at MIT, and realizing the milieu that MIT was in, were you at all attracted to other departments elsewhere?

SOLOW: No. The simple truth of the matter is I loved being at MIT. I loved the department. These were the best people you could imagine. For much of our time at MIT we did most of our social life with my colleagues and their wives and families. There was no stuffiness in the department. There was no hierarchy in the department. everybody was friends with everybody else. Everybody was doing his work. We all had lunch together everyday because we enjoyed each other's company. And some of that I always think must be due to Samuelson. Because by that time, the early 1950s, Paul is obviously the leading economist in the United States or the world. With hardly any question. Everybody knows that. And many people in that position would insist on privileges, or at least even if they didn't insist they would somehow get around that they need privileges. But Paul's not like that at all. And if you have the best economist in the world in the department, and he's not being stuffy about anything it must be hard for anybody else to be stuffy.

So it was a very wonderful place to be. And I loved it. Hollis Chenery who was a graduate student with me at Harvard and someone I knew very well, and he was chief economist at the World Bank later. And a good friend all his life, a good friend of ours. And he came and did a visiting course at MIT sometime in the 1950s. He was on the Harvard faculty then. And we were told that when he returned he said, well I'll tell you that MIT may not be the best economics department. But it's sure the happiest economics department. And that was true. So yes, once I began publishing some serious economics I got offers from other departments. And I really had no interest. I never even bothered to go to Ralph Freeman and say I've been offered such and such a salary by the University of Chicago. Why don't you give me a raise? I never once did anything like that. The only thing I ever did was tell one university, yes I might like to join your faculty, but I have only one condition. You've got to move Paul at the same time. And that was not going to be possible either. So I never felt tempted at all to leave. Never.

INTERVIEWER: Now in 1956 and 1957, you published two fairly substantial important papers. One on steady state growth. And the other on the technical change in aggregate production functions. Maybe you could explain what the theory is behind that, and what they are?

SOLOW: Well if you think back, this is still a decade, 10 years after the end of the war. And one of the great phenomena in the world is the fact that after a lot of post-war hassle, the European economies are beginning to grow rapidly. The US did not really have a post-war recession as everyone feared. And is growing. But these economies are growing at different speeds. There is also the problem of the developing countries. Although that didn't concern me so much. But it was in the air. It was sort of one of the outstanding problems. How to account for, how to provide an explanation of the growth paths of a modern economy, and why some grow faster than others. What characteristics is it that do that?

And there were some attempts to work that out. And the best known were papers by an English economist named Roy Harrod and an American economist named Evsey Domar who later joined the MIT faculty, but was then I think working in Washington. He may have been working in Washington at the Federal Reserve Board or something like that. So the Harrod and Domar papers were what there was fundamentally. And it seemed to me that they couldn't be right. They couldn't have the thing right. Because one of the characteristics that came out from them was-- When I say the growth path, I mean washing out the fluctuations, the business cycles. Ignore them. Imagine they're not there. Or get rid of them statistically, or do something like that.