Edmund Phelps Quotes

Edmund Phelps

Profession : Economist

Birth : July 26, 1933

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

Edmund Phelps

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

Edmund Phelps

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.

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

I could try to incorporate or reflect in my models what it is that an employee, manager, or entrepreneur does: to recognize that most are engaged in their work, form expectations and evolve beliefs, solve problems, and have ideas. Trying to put these people into economic models became my project.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

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

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

'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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

Edmund Phelps

I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps

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.

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

Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985.

Edmund Phelps

Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.

Edmund Phelps

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.

Edmund Phelps