Robert Solow Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.