A commenter points to a talk from 1991, in which Solow says,
Once you take the point of view that I have been urging on you in thinking about sustainability as a matter of distributional equity between the present and the future, you can see that it becomes a problem about saving and investment. It becomes a problem about the choice between current consumption and providing for the future.
The reader recommended the article for this quip:
It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.
I recommend the entire article to readers of this blog and indeed to any student of economics. In fact, I would like to hit every graduate school economics professor over the head with it and say, “This is what you should be aiming to enable your students to do when they get their Ph.Ds.”
Solow deals with the concept of sustainability not with a formal model but with a philosophical examination. It is this ability to think like a philosopher that was lost when MIT transformed economics. Ironically, Solow aided and abetted the transformation.
Solow was my dissertation adviser. Although we have grown apart ideologically, my macro memoir explains how I was drawn to him in the late 1970s:
Unlike many of my fellow students, I am not inspired by Dornbusch and Fischer. I do not see the benefit of writing down equations to solve long-term optimization problems as a way of understanding macroeconomics. To me, too much economic relevance is being sacrificed to the altars of mathematical rigor and rational-expectations dogma. That assessment puts me hopelessly out of step with where academic macroeconomics is headed. It binds me to Solow.
Thanks… I’d like to add:
1) Solow’s math chops are just as solid, but he uses them more wisely than do Fischer or Dornbusch. I’m reminded of Kenneth Boulding’s famous quip: “Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.”
2) I highly recommend Solow’s Econtalk podcast with Russell Roberts, despite the mediocre sound quality, if you want to hear a very lucid defense of old-school Keynesian economics. What a sharp mind, what a convincing speaker. And lively too. Solow doesn’t hesitate to take Roberts to task. Solow’s bons mots probably warrant a post of their own. The one about Milton Friedman and money, great stuff.
3) I am biased, but I think business schools have a greater appreciation for economics without all the excessive math. I would encourage PhD economists to consider b-schools as a great place to work if you’d like your research and teaching to be more about economics and less about math.