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Edmund S. Phelps, the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, Monday won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work furthering the understanding of the tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment. If the Federal Reserve manages to pilot the nation's economy safely through the current period of heightened inflation, it will owe some of its success to this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Big-spending consumers and government officials could also find some words of wisdom in his work. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences yesterday awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to Edmund Phelps, a 73-year-old Columbia University economist whose research has focused on the relationship between unemployment and inflation, as well as on how the spending habits of current generations can affect the well-being of future ones. The economics prize comes with a purse of 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.4 million. The Nobel committee also cited Mr. Phelps's work establishing a "golden rule" of capital formation, which states that any given generation should save and invest a certain amount so that future generations will be able to enjoy a similar standard of living. The rule carries particular significance today, when a negative household saving rate and large budget deficits suggest that U.S. consumers and the government are spending beyond their means -- at a time when an aging population will be putting more stress on the nation's resources. Mr. Phelps, however, said it is hard to know whether or not the U.S. is getting into trouble because important pieces of information -- such as how productive the U.S. economy will be -- are lacking. "The question is not as simple as it might look," he said. "Maybe productivity will rise so rapidly as to dwarf the demographic overhang, so we won't understand why it was that we were ever worried about it when we get there." ![[Edmund Phelps]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/HC-GI826_Phelps_20061009184447.gif)
Born in Chicago at the depth of the Great Depression, Mr. Phelps developed an early interest in research. During childhood in New York, "I liked to spend the late afternoon by the main road recording the distribution by state of the license plates of the cars passing by," he wrote in an autobiography. He said he entered economics at the urging of his father, after toying briefly with philosophy. Mr. Phelps earned his doctorate at Yale University in 1959 and joined the Columbia faculty in 1971. Mr. Phelps's prize brings to four the tally of economics Nobels awarded to Columbia professors. | 
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发表于 2006-10-12 02:00:00
