EDMUND PHELPS

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

To prosper and advance, the American business sector is going to need a financial system oriented toward business, not 'home ownership.'

Entrepreneurs' willingness to innovate or just to invest - and thus create new jobs - is driven by their 'animal spirits,' as they decide whether to leap into the void.

Some economists believe that the Greeks' work ethic and thrift can pull them through. But the classical virtues can do nothing to offset the dearth of innovation that plagues the economy.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

Things can get only so bad. People want to eat, so at some point they resist further cuts to their consumption - it's not a bottomless pit.

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.'

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.

I think the 19th century is an extraordinary period with a welling up of creativity and all kinds of experimentation and exploration going on at least until 1940.

When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.

Democrats and Republicans have been very keen to make home ownership almost a national purpose.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.

Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

Narrow banks could restart effective intermediation and ensure that consumers and employment-creating small and medium-size enterprises are adequately financed and can contribute to the reactivation of the economy.

A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.

The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.