The Honorary Patronage of Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps, born in 1933 in Evanston, grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson. He earned his B.A. from Amherst (1955) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1959). He is McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, Director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. Phelps's work can be seen as a program to put "people as we know them" back into economic models -- accounting for the incompleteness of their information and studying the effects of their expectations on the market. He applies this perspective in studying unemployment and inclusion, economic growth, business swings and dynamism. Phelps is a Fellow of the National Academy of Science, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a recipeint of the Kiel Global Economy Prize. In 2011, Professor Phelps received the Louise Blouin Creative Leadership Award and