Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union. – Edmund Phelps
I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940. – Edmund Phelps
The Keynesian belief that ‘demand’ is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy. – 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
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
A nation’s economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights. – Edmund Phelps
Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage. – 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
I’m old enough to remember in the 1930s and the 1940s when thrift, frugality, was considered an important virtue. – 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
Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to ‘raise’ employment, and we’d all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs. – 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
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
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. – Edmund Phelps
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
Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose. – Edmund Phelps
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. – Edmund Phelps
To pump up consumer or government demand would force interest rates up and asset prices down, possibly by enough to destroy more jobs than are created. – 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
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. – Edmund Phelps
Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud. – 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
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
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
I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept? – Edmund Phelps
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. – Edmund Phelps
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. – Edmund Phelps
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. – 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