93 Quotes by Edmund Phelps

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market.

Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.

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.