flâneur

What the Solow Model can teach us about China

noahpinion.blog · 2,093 words · saved by 1 readers

The economist Robert Solow died this week, at the age of 99. He was a giant in his field, reshaping macroeconomics in a million ways that we take for granted today. Although he did work in numerous important areas, his most famous contribution by far — and the one for which he won the Nobel — was the Solow model of economic growth. So today, in honor of his passing, I wanted to talk a little about how the Solow model helps explain what we’ve seen happen to China’s economy over the last few decades, and especially in the last couple of years. The question of why economies grow, and why they stop growing, is perhaps the most important in all of economics. It’s also an incredibly difficult question, both because growth is such a complicated thing, and because it’s very hard to compare different countries’ experiences. The Solow model is an incredibly simple thing — so simple that a bright junior high school student can learn it. It has only a few variables and a few parameters. There’s no

The economist Robert Solow died this week, at the age of 99. He was a giant in his field, reshaping macroeconomics in a million ways that we take for granted today. Although he did work in numerous important areas, his most famous contribution by far — and the one for which he won the Nobel — was the Solow model of economic growth. So today, in honor of his passing, I wanted to talk a little about how the Solow model helps explain what we’ve seen happen to China’s economy over the last few decades, and especially in the last couple of years. The question of why economies grow, and why they…

related reading