In essence it is does not Keynesian and said happily structuralist

Welcoming the award to Edmund Phelps, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Nobel Prize in economics, many French commentators described it as "néokeynésien", it recognized the merit of having "modernized" the analysis of Keynes. Having regard to the release of the Nobel Academy, which focused on her contribution to the analysis of the inflation-unemployment and his authorship of the famous Nairu, unemployment rate which corresponds, according to his analysis repeatedly repeated since then, at a constant rate of inflation, it is true that such characterization is tempting. But is it well founded Nothing is less sure, in the light of all of his contributions to economic analysis, and the most recent suggest even the opposite.

Certainly Phelps shares with Keynes project to explore the functioning of the economy outside the "classical" balance of perfect competition and complete information. As many economists of his generation and the next years, he has sought to invalidate, or at least to qualify the conclusions of the classical economists who, Adam Smith Jean-Baptiste Say, and to Robert Lucas, wanted demonstrate not only the existence of a conventional balance but especially its permanent and its invariant to macroeconomic policy character. In the early 690 itself had contributed to the analysis of growth with its "golden rule" of the optimal capital accumulation, to popularize the idea of an underlying trail of an equilibrium growth or growth potential, to tend the economy. But a large part of its scientific production then focused on the identification of the many "imperfections" that conceals the real economic world and which prevented him from this ideal balance with resources full employment and price stability. Information asymmetries, explicit or implicit contracts constituting a response to the uncertainty as a result, this is likely to keep the economy from its balance of full employment.

However, it does not follow that macroeconomic policies have only transient another power. It is the main involvement of the contribution for which the Nobel Committee the Crown. In 1967, shortly before Milton Friedman, he proposed a challenge to the apparent opportunity for Governments to choose between inflation and unemployment, which, in itself, there is nothing very Keynesian. Subsequently, many flocked to infer that such arbitration was possible in the short-medium term. Phelps himself spent part of his work to highlight the mechanisms to explain this possibility.

In essence, it is does not Keynesian and said happily "structuralist". This economic structuralism is the result of a completely innovative vision of the modern economy, with emphasis on temporal dimension and, as Keynes, but a radically different way, on the uncertainty that generate the temporality of production and the Merchant Exchange in decentralized contemporary capitalist economies, and the information problems related to the complexity of the scattering of individual decisions of which they consist. On these premises, it built a heritage theory of the economy in which the intertemporal trade-offs are all individual strategies, companies including engines.

In reading "structuralist" of the economy, the company is essentially a set of tangible and intangible, assets which can be accumulated or décumulés, and in particular of the discount rate of future income that they are likely to provide the shareholders owners depends the value: traditional assets which constitute the productive capital, but also, and especially, intangible assets that are not only the patents and know-how of the companybut its customers and its qualified employees. As in Wicksell, the rate of interest and, in his work with Jean-Paul Fitoussi on the international transfer of changing circumstances, the rate of change ("The Slump in Europe", 1987) plays a central role in the dynamics of the economy, but this time, coupled to the process of upgrading the stock market of these "packages of specific assets" that are businesses. And in this economy, macroeconomic policy, and especially fiscal policies, do not have the traditional Keynesian effects: in his most recent book of macroeconomic theory ("Structural Slumps", 1994), these policies have even "anti-keynésiens" effects, because the economy is depicted with a pattern of single-agent, representative of the large number of identical supposed agents, therefore without imperfections of competition problems and especially problems of coordination.

This heritage theory is completed, since the meeting of Phelps with John Rawls, a concern, although little Keynesian or show, political economy and social justice ("Political economy, an introduction", English translation, Fayard, 1990), a fear of disappearing demand for work not qualified in technologically advanced economies and the desire to encourage all members of society to participate actively in the production process. Where Phelps's work on the "working poor" and low-wage subsidy policies, his most recent engagement.