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
To prosper and advance, the American business sector is going to need a financial system oriented toward business, not 'home ownership.'
Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.
When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.
I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.
Corporatist attitudes against capitalism came to the fore in the 1920s. Corporatists, with their conservative values, hated the invasion of towns and regions by new businesses, upsetting traditional ways, wealth and status.
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?
The need to encourage entrepreneurship and ensure that young people have the opportunity to start new businesses is acute.
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 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.
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.
A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.