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" 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. "

Edmund Phelps

Growth

Competition

" In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income. "

" What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate. "

" 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. "

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

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

" For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory. "

" 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. "

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

" The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level. "

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

" I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept? "

" 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. "

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

" Unemployment rates tend to rise and fall in roughly equal proportion at all rungs of the ladder, and that happened between 1973 and 1985. "

" 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. "

Edmund Phelps

Government

Enough

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change. "

" It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment. "