Edmund Phelps: Threats to Prosperity

Mon, Nov 4 2013 - 6:00pm

Edmund Phelps, Director, Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; Author, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change; Twitter: @EdmundPhelps

Alan Auerbach, Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley - Moderator

Nobel Prize-winning economist Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper, and why he believes the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore and meet challenges. Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago, Phelps says, because the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. Will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few?

Location: SF Club Office
Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing
Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID)