Edmund Phelps

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.”

“I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented.”

“If you rent, that's it. You don't have to pay any interest to anybody. You don't have to pay any maintenance costs to anybody. You don't have to worry about whether the boiler is going to break down. While if you own your own home, you have a hundred aggravations.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others.”

“Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.”

“Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.”

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