Biography

Edmund S. Phelps was born in 1933 in Chicago and grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He received his B.A. at Amherst College in 1955 and his Ph.D. at Yale in 1959. After several years at Pennsylvania and Yale, he became Professor of Economics at Columbia in 1971 and McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982. He is the founding director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, formed in 2001 and now in the Earth Institute at Columbia.

A common thread running through Phelps’s work is his effort to put people – as we know them – into economic models. He has sought to take account of the incompleteness of their information and their knowledge and to study the effect of their expectations and beliefs on market outcomes. He has taken this perspective in studying the volume of unemployment, the rate of economic growth and, relatedly, job satisfaction and its centrality in people’s lives

He first became known for contributions to the understanding of productivity growth – research, education and the ‘golden rule’ – at Yale’s Cowles Foundation in the early 1960s. His most seminal work was his rudimentary theory of a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment – its existence, how its size is determined and how market forces may drive unemployment from it. This work was collected in the volume Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory (1970). Later he revisited the natural rate, showing in Structural Slumps (1994) that changing market forces could account for its shifting character. Subsequently, in his Rewarding Work (1997) he focused on joblessness among less advantaged workers, arguing that the problem solving offered by good jobs is generally necessary for personal development. He then moved on to alternative economic systems and the contrasting consequences for personal growth and satisfaction.

In lectures, columns and Enterprise and Inclusion in Italy (2002) he laid the European continent’s economic problems to a dearth of ‘dynamism’ and ascribed it more to the Continent’s ‘corporatism’ than to high taxes on labor and to the welfare state. His present research is aimed toward modeling capitalism.

Phelps was Senior Advisor to the project ‘Italy in Europe’ of Italy’s CNR from 1997 to 2000. He was a charter member of the Economic Advisory Council of the EBRD and was editor and senior writer for the Annual Economic Outlook (1993). He was on the International Panel of the OFCE in Paris in the early 1990s.

He was co-organizer of the Villa Mondragone seminars in Rome from 1990 to 2000 and of the International School of Economics in Siena from 1987 to 1990. He was a consultant for the OECD in 1999, the CBO in 1994, the EC in 1987, Banca d’Italia in 1985, the IMF in 1983 and 1985, the FRB in 1983, the Senate Finance Committee in 1975 and the U.S. Treasury Department in 1972.

Phelps is the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981at age 47. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society. In 2000 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Amherst College in 1985, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in 2001, University of Mannheim in 2001, Universidade Nova of Lisbon in 2003, University of Paris-Dauphine and the University of Iceland in 2004, and Institut d’Etudes des Sciences Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) in 2006.

He has several honorary professorships from China. In 2003 Princeton University Press published a 600 page Festschrift volume, P. Aghion, R. Frydman, J. E. Stiglitz and M. Woodford, eds. Knowledge, Information and Expectations in Modern Economics in his honor.