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'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.
When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses?
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.
A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.
Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.
Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.
I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.
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've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.
It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.