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 didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.
For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.
Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.
Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.
Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.
An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.
A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue.
In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.