Breezy, candid, refreshing and a tad dense in some passages (especially for someone who does not consider economics to be his/her first language), My Journeys in Economic Theory is all about bucking the trend and challenging received wisdom. the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2006, the founding director of the Center on Capitalism and Society and McVickar Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Columbia University, Edmund Phelps has and continues to have a storied career in his chosen profession. An accomplished trumpet player, Phelps has been associated in various capacities with the RAND Corporation, the Cowles Foundation at Yale (where he got his PhD in 1959), Penn and Columbia University.

Phelps is famous for his forays into the complex field of ‘imperfect information’. In a work Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory, Phelps asserted that that workers, customers, and corporations must make many decisions sans full or contemporaneous information. This lacuna is offset by forming expectations to fill in for the missing information.

In a famous departure from the much vaunted and touted Schumpeterian theory of creative destruction, Phelps, postulated that economic progress and scientific innovation is not always an exogenous event in so far as that such ideas spring from outside a country before being imported into it. The enthusiasm and aspirations of people within, non-material rewards of work: being engaged in projects, the delight of succeeding at something and the experience of flourishing are critical factors that spur innovation. This facet found detailed expression in Phelps’s book Flourishing.

My Journeys in Economic Theory also regales the readers about the spirited and invigorating deliberations and debated which Phelps has had over the course of his professional career with some absolute colossal figures spanning myriad discipline such as Paul Samuelson, John Rawls, James Tobin etc. The book also contains some heartwarming reminiscences about Phelps’s love towards music and the arts.

My Journeys in Economic Theory – a recollection of candour, cause, and consequence.

My Journeys In Economic Theory is a very interesting book that is short but packed with information. It offers a very concise view into an illustrious career that offered paradigm shifting observations on every area it dealt on. I feel that someone who has a working knowledge on economy will be benefitted hugely by reading this book. For me, who is just a layman as far as economic theories are concerned, it was a bit tough even though rewarding book. I had to refer many other sources to make many points palatable for me and still I will accept that I haven't comprehended it fully. But I am definitely more wiser on economic theories and more inspired after reading about the life of Edmund Phelps.

What an educational journey!

Phelps took me on his journey in economic theory. At times, I felt I was walking with him on an idle, yet intellectually enriching path, learning about the theories of Keynes and Hayes, along with Phelps’s own contributions to modern economics. Other times, I found myself trying to untangle Phelps’s wordiness. I would have enjoyed a more succinct and straight-to-the-point writing style, but that is just my personal preference.
That being said, this memoir is packed with knowledge! Throughout the book, Phelps introduced me to his friends and influencers; I found myself researching the works of Paul Samuelson, as well as Herman Wouk, who wrote The Caine Mutiny. Anyone interested in economics should not hesitate to dive into Phelps’s journey! At the end of the journey, you will be left with an enriched understanding and appreciation of the key players who contributed and dedicated their lives to modern economy, such as Edmund Phelps!

“There will be new questions to address and new ideas holding the answers.”


In this memoir of economic theory, Phelps recounts the ‘innovative’ and ‘dynamic’ path to modern economy. He travels his own journey from being at RAND, Yale, MIT, to Columbia University during his 60 years as an economic theorist. Working on numerous economic models during the fall in economic growth in the US and UK sparked the “creativity” [which the author believes is out of the ordinary among economic theorists.] which led to various modern economic models. His early contributions to the theories conceived by others: Keynes’s, Solow’s, Rawls’s and Hayek's, was not big enough to contain Phelps’s ambition. Only a theory of his own would do. [“I had long last used my creativity.”]


It was greatly insightful reading a memoir compressing the knowledge, observations of six decades. Involving interactions with other greats of economics, the learning from the book was immense.


Students of economics should read this study narrated [primarily walked down] by Edmund Phelps, a Nobel laureate, and most of all “a great teacher.”