When you win a Nobel Prize in Economics you’re entitled to write a short book about how it happened. Edmund Phelps was born in 1933 and grew up in Chicago, a few blocks from Lake Michigan on Glenwood Avenue. Phelps was an only child. Phelps’s father worked in a Chicago bank. His mother was very social and became the head of the Parent Teacher Association and the local League of Women Voters. Phelps’s parents stressed education (both of his parents had college educations) and cultural events like plays.

When citing works that were important to him growing up, Phelps lists Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang, H. Rider Haggard’s King Soloman’s Mines and She, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Once again, a solid grounding in great books leads to greatness!

This short book captures the ups and downs of a career. In this case, it ends in a Nobel Prize for a hard-working, diligent academic. My Journeys in Economic Theory delivers hope and inspiration. GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface — xi
Introduction: Formative Years — 1
1. Starting My Career: Golden Rule of Saving and Public Debt — 21
2. A New Direction: Uncertainty and Expectations — 41
3. Unemployment, Work’s Rewards, and Job Discrimination — 61
4. Altruism and Rawlsian Justice — 70
5. Supply-Siders, New “Classicals,” and an un-Keynesian Slump — 87
6. A Revolutionary Decade — 107
7. A Festschrift, a Nobel, and a New Horizon — 131
8. The Great Wave of Indigenous Innovation, Meaningful Work, and the Good Life — 153
Epilogue — 187
Acknowledgments — 197
Notes — 199
Index — 215