Edmund S. Phelps
Edmund S. Phelps is Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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2009-12-08
| BERLIN – The near global financial meltdown and ensuing downturns left the Anglo-Saxon nations pondering what they should do both to set their economies on a path toward recovery and to avoid a similar crisis in the future. Some recommendations by members of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society were sent to last April’s G20 meeting. To create more jobs in the economy, I proposed that governments establish a class of banks that would acquire the lost art of financing investment projects in the business sector – the type of financing the old “merchant” banks did so well a century ago. I also renewed my support for a subsidy to companies for their ongoing employment of low-wage workers. (Singapore adopted this idea with enviable results.)... read |
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2008-12-01
| In view the current financial crisis, it is fair to ask whether the benefits of capitalism, if any, exceed the costs. For anyone who values innovation and shuns dull, tedious, or onerous work in favor of stimulating, engaging, and mind-expanding work, the answer remains yes.... read |
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2008-11-07
| At the October 22 donors’ meeting on Georgia, aid pledges rolled in, totaling $4.5 billion. But the process was deeply flawed, and it overlooked the need for inclusive and dynamic growth, without which sustainable peace will remain elusive, leaving donors hard pressed to justify actually committing the large financial aid package that they have pledged.... read |
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2007-07-09
| Effective financing for peacetime is a good investment of donors’ resources and a major factor in conflict prevention. Indeed, the UN reckons that if economic reconstruction fails, countries in the transition to peace have a better than even chance of reverting to war.... read |
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2006-10-10
| There is a movement in medicine to require that applications for licenses to sell a new drug be “evidence-based.” By contrast, trained economists view their discipline as having already achieved this scientific standard. After all, they express their ideas with mathematics and arrive at quantitative estimates of implied relationships from empirical data.... read |
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2006-05-01
| Was France’s recent wave of protests against an amendment that would have increased employers’ freedom to fire young workers a blessing in disguise? To defuse the protests, President Jacques Chirac was forced to withdraw the provision, and instead has proposed hiring subsidies as a way to reduce youth joblessness. A related proposal for targeted wage subsidies is being floated in Germany.... read |
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2003-12-11
| Proposals for economic reform of Continental Europe keep coming. The process does not constitute a unified, reasoned debate so much as an ongoing political auction in which special interests seek votes for the policy change that will benefit them.... read |
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2002-11-30
| Following centuries of bold explorations in science, navigation and engineering, Continental Europe in the 20th century launched major social innovations. New economic policies and institutions were invented in the belief that a more rationally and humanely organized economy would deliver higher productivity and wages, greater job satisfaction, lower unemployment, wider participation, and milder slumps. This has resulted in a market economy that retains private ownership, but that looks very different from other market economies, such as America's. ... read |
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2001-04-05
| Why are there economic booms and busts, those long swings between expansion and slowdown? Traditional explanations focus on bad monetary policy. My research argues that they are usually structural, the result of powerful shifts in expectations about future productivity and profitability. ... read |
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The Economic Case Against Bush's Tax Cut
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Edmund S. Phelps 
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NEW YORK: Washington politicians are worried over signs that America’s great structural boom of the past five years is over: a poorer outlook for profits, increased corporate debts, and a related slowing of business investment in fixed capital, new customers and new employees. If the boom is over, the structural unemployment rate – alias the ‘natural rate,’ or Nairu – will rise to a more normal 4.5 to 5%. Alan Greenspan, chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, can help by avoiding tight money but he cannot undo this structural shift. ... read
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2006-05-01
| Was France’s recent wave of protests against an amendment that would have increased employers’ freedom to fire young workers a blessing in disguise? To defuse the protests, President Jacques Chirac was forced to withdraw the provision, and instead has proposed hiring subsidies as a way to reduce youth joblessness. A related proposal for targeted wage subsidies is being floated in Germany.... read |
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2003-12-11
| Proposals for economic reform of Continental Europe keep coming. The process does not constitute a unified, reasoned debate so much as an ongoing political auction in which special interests seek votes for the policy change that will benefit them.... read |
-
2002-11-30
| Following centuries of bold explorations in science, navigation and engineering, Continental Europe in the 20th century launched major social innovations. New economic policies and institutions were invented in the belief that a more rationally and humanely organized economy would deliver higher productivity and wages, greater job satisfaction, lower unemployment, wider participation, and milder slumps. This has resulted in a market economy that retains private ownership, but that looks very different from other market economies, such as America's. ... read |
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2001-02-19
| NEW YORK: Washington politicians are worried over signs that America’s great structural boom of the past five years is over: a poorer outlook for profits, increased corporate debts, and a related slowing of business investment in fixed capital, new customers and new employees. If the boom is over, the structural unemployment rate – alias the ‘natural rate,’ or Nairu – will rise to a more normal 4.5 to 5%. Alan Greenspan, chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, can help by avoiding tight money but he cannot undo this structural shift. ... read |
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2008-11-07
| At the October 22 donors’ meeting on Georgia, aid pledges rolled in, totaling $4.5 billion. But the process was deeply flawed, and it overlooked the need for inclusive and dynamic growth, without which sustainable peace will remain elusive, leaving donors hard pressed to justify actually committing the large financial aid package that they have pledged.... read |
-
2001-04-05
| Why are there economic booms and busts, those long swings between expansion and slowdown? Traditional explanations focus on bad monetary policy. My research argues that they are usually structural, the result of powerful shifts in expectations about future productivity and profitability. ... read |
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2007-07-09
| Effective financing for peacetime is a good investment of donors’ resources and a major factor in conflict prevention. Indeed, the UN reckons that if economic reconstruction fails, countries in the transition to peace have a better than even chance of reverting to war.... read |
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2006-10-10
| There is a movement in medicine to require that applications for licenses to sell a new drug be “evidence-based.” By contrast, trained economists view their discipline as having already achieved this scientific standard. After all, they express their ideas with mathematics and arrive at quantitative estimates of implied relationships from empirical data.... read |
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2008-12-01
| In view the current financial crisis, it is fair to ask whether the benefits of capitalism, if any, exceed the costs. For anyone who values innovation and shuns dull, tedious, or onerous work in favor of stimulating, engaging, and mind-expanding work, the answer remains yes.... read |
