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
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.
With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.
After a major loss of dynamism in the 1960s, productivity growth rates began dropping in most countries, falling by half in the U.S. in the 1970s and more or less ceasing altogether in France, Germany and Britain in the late 1990s.
Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others.
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.
At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards.
I'm not attacking the idea that people live in conglomerations of houses in proximity to one another, sharing the same water mains and the same newspaper delivery boy and so forth. I'm not objecting to that. That could happen with or without homeownership.
'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.
No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.
The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.
Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their consumption - it's not a bottomless pit.
The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level.