Edmund Phelps
Edmund Phelps
Edmund Strother Phelps, Jr.is an American economist and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career he became renowned for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the Golden Rule savings rate, a concept first devised by John von Neumann and Maurice Allais, started a wave of research on how much a nation ought to spend on present...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth26 July 1933
CountryUnited States of America
I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented.
I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.
One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up.
My God, I don't know anyone who likes to accumulate their wealth more than the Europeans.
Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.
To pump up consumer or government demand would force interest rates up and asset prices down, possibly by enough to destroy more jobs than are created.
When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.
When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it - for the challenge of its mysteries.
It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.
In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.
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.
I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.
I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?