Edmund Phelps Quotes
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The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.
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Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.
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Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market.
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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.
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You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.
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One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up.
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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.
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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.
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I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.
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I just think that the Europeans are depriving themselves of a high-employment economy, and they are depriving themselves of intellectual stimulation in the workplace - and personal growth - by sticking to the stultifying, rigid system that I call corporatism.
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Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others.
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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.
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It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.
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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.
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The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment.
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A modern economy is marked by the feasibility of endogenous change: Modernization brings myriad arrangements from expanded property rights to company law and financial institutions.
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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.
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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.
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When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.
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For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.
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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.
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The stampede toward 'rational expectations' - widely thought to be a 'revolution,' though it was only a generalization of the neoclassical idea of equilibrium-derailed the expectations-driven model building that had just left the station. In the end, this way of modeling has not illuminated how the world economy works.