Edmund Phelps

Economist

1933-07-26

Books by Edmund Phelps

My Journeys in Economic Theory
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Quotes by Edmund Phelps

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.
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In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.
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It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.
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I just think that the Europeans are depriving themselves of a high-employment economy, and they are depriving themselves of intellectual stimulation in the workplace - and personal growth - by sticking to the stultifying, rigid system that I call corporatism.
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I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.
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A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.
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Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
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I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.
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My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.
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Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
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In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.
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Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
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An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
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An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.
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America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most.
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Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy.
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