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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.
Edmund Phelps -
Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.
Edmund Phelps
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There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.
Edmund Phelps -
An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
Edmund Phelps -
Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
Edmund Phelps -
What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.
Edmund Phelps -
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.
Edmund Phelps -
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.
Edmund Phelps
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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.
Edmund Phelps -
As a grandson of farmers in downstate Illinois, I have long admired the dedication of farmers to their work and have written about the role of agriculture in American innovation.
Edmund Phelps -
America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most.
Edmund Phelps -
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?
Edmund Phelps -
Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
Edmund Phelps -
A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.
Edmund Phelps
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If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.
Edmund Phelps -
I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.
Edmund Phelps -
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.
Edmund Phelps -
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.
Edmund Phelps -
Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.
Edmund Phelps -
The celebration of homeownership seems to be part of a countermovement against popular owning of shares in corporations.
Edmund Phelps
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Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.
Edmund Phelps -
Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.
Edmund Phelps -
If you rent, that's it. You don't have to pay any interest to anybody. You don't have to pay any maintenance costs to anybody. You don't have to worry about whether the boiler is going to break down. While if you own your own home, you have a hundred aggravations.
Edmund Phelps -
Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.
Edmund Phelps