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 a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.
Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.
Italy and France could lop off their excessive wealth through a one-time tax on private wealth.
I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.
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.
The celebration of homeownership seems to be part of a countermovement against popular owning of shares in corporations.
The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'
Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.
The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
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.
I started to think about what drives innovation and what its social significance might be. The next step was to think innovators are taking a leap into the unknown. That led me to the thought that it is also a source of fun and employee engagement.
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.
Narrow banks could restart effective intermediation and ensure that consumers and employment-creating small and medium-size enterprises are adequately financed and can contribute to the reactivation of the economy.