RAND Distinguished Speaker Series: Edmund Phelps

Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps is director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University as well as dean of New Huadu Business School at Minjiang University in Fuzhou, China. His work attempts to put “people as we know them” back into economic models, accounting for the incompleteness of their information and studying how their expectations affect the market. He began his career as an economist at the RAND Corporation. His newest book is Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (2013), in which he argues that “the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual.”

Moderator

Peter Passell is editor of The Milken Institute Review, the Institute's economic quarterly. He joined the Institute as a senior fellow after eight years as an economics columnist for The New York Times. He previously served on the Times' editorial board and was an assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate Department of Economics. His research interests include international finance and trade, economic history, and the economics of crime. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University.