The most important thing Edmund Phelps learned?
By Paul
An interview with Edmund Phelps;
"The most important thing I've learned about how markets work or how economies work? …Offhand I can't think of the most important thing that I've learned. Maybe it is that when I was starting out in the subject I had little sense of the uncertainty under which the economic actors in the economy have to operate. I was very much under the influence of textbook models that I'd been studying in college and in graduate school, and it's only very, very slowly over decades and decades that my conception of what a healthy market economy is all about has developed. So I think maybe that's the biggest thing I've learned, is that the future is highly uncertain, the start-up entrepreneurs and even the CEOs and the established companies are aware of the uncertainties, financiers are aware of these uncertainties, everybody acts accordingly, and that makes the economy quite different from the way it is still described in the textbooks."
Listen to the podcast.
Related;
Some of the articles by Edmund Phelps in the Wall Street Journal- Dynamic Capitalism, Remedies for New Orleans, The Way We Live Now, Crash, Bang, Wallop, False Hope for the Economy – and False Fears, Scapegoating the Natural Rate
His columns at Project Syndicate
The Economic Performance of Nations:Prosperity Depends on Dynamism, Dynamism on Institutions (working paper)
Phelps work explained- Tyler Cowen, Aplia blog and The Economist