Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Edmund Phelps - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

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

Italy and France could lop off their excessive wealth through a one-time tax on private wealth.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

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.

To prosper and advance, the American business sector is going to need a financial system oriented toward business, not 'home ownership.'

The celebration of homeownership seems to be part of a countermovement against popular owning of shares in corporations.

I just think that the Europeans are depriving themselves of a high-employment economy, and they are depriving themselves of intellectual stimulation in the workplace - and personal growth - by sticking to the stultifying, rigid system that I call corporatism.

I'm not attacking the idea that people live in conglomerations of houses in proximity to one another, sharing the same water mains and the same newspaper delivery boy and so forth. I'm not objecting to that. That could happen with or without homeownership.

I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.

The level of dynamism is a matter of how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.

My God, I don't know anyone who likes to accumulate their wealth more than the Europeans.

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.

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

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.

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.

The difficulties of many European countries derive from their corporatism: state projects serving cronies and vast social protection programmes, both run by elites. These surged in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards.

Economics has paid a terrible price for its dalliances with the Keynesian and neoclassical theories.

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.

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.

Narrow banks could restart effective intermediation and ensure that consumers and employment-creating small and medium-size enterprises are adequately financed and can contribute to the reactivation of the economy.

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

The need to encourage entrepreneurship and ensure that young people have the opportunity to start new businesses is acute.

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.

I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.