Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who this week won the Nobel prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated by the monetary authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. Mr Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure.
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