Robert Solow Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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