When a governmental crisis subsides, citizens are apt to wonder whether all the deficit spending is going to cost something. This situation is the subject of wildly differing views. Which view appears to be most nearly right? The Keynesian view that public debt serves to pull up employment, thus...

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s,...