Author

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.

From Edmund Phelps

I started to think about what drives innovation and what its social significance might be. The next step was to think innovators are taking a leap into the unknown. That led me to the thought that it is also a source of fun and employee engagement.

From Edmund Phelps

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

From Edmund Phelps

When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.

From Edmund Phelps

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

From Edmund Phelps

I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.

From 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.

From Edmund Phelps

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

From Edmund Phelps

America's peak years of indigenous innovation ran from the 1820s to the 1960s. There were a few financial panics and two depressions, to be sure. But in this period, a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all, and engaging careers for most.

From Edmund Phelps

My view is that innovation has declined in the everyday processes that businesses tinker with incrementally as they try to become more productive over time.

From Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps

Notable Quotes

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Authors with Opposing Views

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Aristotle

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