Edmund Phelps Quotes

Edmund Phelps

Profession : Economist

Birth : July 26, 1933

Developing new products is labour- intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.

Edmund Phelps

I'm old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue.

Edmund Phelps

An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.

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

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.

Edmund Phelps

Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.

Edmund Phelps

With less competition to fear, companies are emboldened to raise their mark-ups and profits. That lifts share prices and thus the wealth of already wealthy shareholders.

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

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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.

Edmund Phelps

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

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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

Edmund Phelps

Entrepreneurs' willingness to innovate or just to invest - and thus create new jobs - is driven by their 'animal spirits,' as they decide whether to leap into the void.

Edmund Phelps

In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a comparable lack of inclusion among North Africans. In much of Europe, there has been little attempt to include the Roma.

Edmund Phelps