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He could be critical of Romer (there was a representative agent in some versions of the model), but, yes, there was respect.

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Dec 22, 2023Liked by Rajiv Sethi

Thank you for your fascinating tribute to Solow. The family tree is very interesting. Did he not have a single female student? Curious.

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Dec 22, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Author

Not a single one Catherine! I checked many times. At least none that is listed. I know that Linda Loury was in the program at the time but not sure who her adviser was.

At least we get Kranton, Casella, Ramey and others in the next generation.

Two of the listed students were African-American: Glenn and Sam Myers

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I met Solow once and wasn't impressed; see here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/10/04/flamebait-mathiness-in-economics-and-political-science/

But maybe he was having a bad day.

The larger problem I see is the habit of economists describing other economists in heroic terms. I guess econ takes this from math and physics. I remember as a math and physics student how we were supposed to worship Archimedes, Newton, Euler, etc. I'm sure they all deserved this, but it seems to have transferred into academics in certain fields making idols of their predecessors and even of their colleagues.

In poli sci I don't see this ancestor-worship being so strong. Locke and Hobbes are heroes, sure, but modern political scientists don't seem to be idolizing the political scientists of the mid and late twentieth century.

As to statistics: as students, we were taught that Fisher or Neyman were heroes, and I do think that has caused some problems. We should be able to celebrate great work without idealizing the individuals involved. They're just people!

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Economists can be quite brutal and dismissive towards each other also Andrew, see for example Romer in the post you linked to! Solow himself was very critical of Lucas. For me there are relatively few real heroes, and Solow would not be among them. But his list of academic descendants is unmatched in terms of status and influence.

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I agree that economists can be negative about each other (for example, Krugman on Hayek and Galbraith: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/12/06/krugman-disses-hayek-as-being-almost-entirely-about-politics-rather-than-economics/). In that, they're different from mathematicians and physicists, who wrote about their predecessors with worship or else didn't bother writing about them at all. I can't recall any mathematicians saying, "Cauchy wasn't all that."

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