Edmund Phelps, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics, is McVickar Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Columbia University, where he served from 1971 to 2021. From 2001 until its closing in 2024, he was Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society. Educated at Amherst College (B.A., 1955) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1959), Phelps previously held positions at RAND, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing span public debt, inflation, unemployment theory, innovation, economic justice, and the moral foundations of capitalism, with particular emphasis on the relationship between economic dynamism and the good life.