Top 93 Quotes by Edmund Phelps

If you rent, that's it. You don't have to pay any interest to anybody. You don't have to pay any maintenance costs to anybody. You don't have to worry about whether the boiler is going to break down. While if you own your own home, you have a hundred aggravations.

I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.

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.

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.

The good life, as it is popularly conceived, typically involves acquiring mastery in one's work, thus gaining for oneself better terms - or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial - an experience we may call 'prospering.'

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.