Words matter. These are the best Edmund Phelps Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
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.
My thinking has always been that the worst problem we have with regard to lack of inclusion is the terribly low labor force participation rates and terribly high unemployment rates of young men, especially young men in ethnic minority groups and, in particular, young black men.
I would like to see people dreaming of striking out on their own into some other country or their own, wherever they feel the action is, in the hope of an exciting and rewarding career.
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.
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.
When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.
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.
My God, I don’t know anyone who likes to accumulate their wealth more than the Europeans.
When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it – for the challenge of its mysteries.
Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change.
The celebration of homeownership seems to be part of a countermovement against popular owning of shares in corporations.
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.
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.
Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.
A nation’s economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I’m still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.
I don’t think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it’s going.
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.
Some economists believe that the Greeks’ work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy.
My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.
Those of us born into vitalist and expressionist cultures must hope that governments will draw back from shutting down the modernist project of exploring, experimenting, and imagining – of voyaging into the unknown – that has been essential for rewarding lives.
An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
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.
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.
There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy’s entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
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.
Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.
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.
Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others.
Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge ‘social wealth’ that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.
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.
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.
‘Egalitarians’ who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.
In the 1960s, and stretching back to the 1930s, it was felt by many economists that easy money is a reliable way to increase employment.
No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.
In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of ‘modern values’ – individualism, vitalism and self-expression – there’s also higher reported job satisfaction.
I’m old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.
Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.
