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
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.
You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.
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?
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.