A Comment on “What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” by Edmund Phelps

Abstract

The paper confront the Phelps’ theses on a decay of what he calls a flourishing era of capitalism with the commentator’s own experience with approaches that countries in Central and Eastern Europe must have adopted in the early 1990s during the so called transition. Unlike Phelps, the commentator states that an attachment to the text-book economics can hardly prevent the innovativeness and creativity of architects of institutional change. Moreover, the commentator claims that not only the 19th century but also the above few years of the end of the last century enjoyed Phelpsian flourishing.