This festschrift volume for Edmund Phelps is a remarkable book. It contains many papers by very distinguished macroeconomists, all in areas to which Phelps made big contributions. Many of the individual papers are excellent but their cumulative effect is extraordinary, giving a sense of the huge impact of Phelps’ work. He evidently is an impressively deep thinker with wide‐ranging interests and a very broad mind. Phelps can take full or substantial credit for the natural rate of unemployment, the expectations‐augmented Phillips curve, the island parable, efficiency wages, the golden rule of growth, and much more (page 3). The book is divided into four parts: Information, Wage‐Price Dynamics, and Business Fluctuations; Imperfect Knowledge, Expectations, and Rationality; Determinants of Equilibrium Unemployment; and Education, Technical Change, and Growth. Of course, this is a credible topics list for a first‐year graduate course in macroeconomics; however despite this coverage the book does not resemble a textbook. The papers almost always derive clearly from Phelps but the authors take the ideas in their own idiosyncratic, often esoteric, directions. Nevertheless, some chapters do give a strong sense of the main ideas at stake, including the editors’ introduction, chapter 7 (Lucas), chapter 12 (Pollak), chapter 13 (Phelps), chapter 17 (Blanchard), chapter 22 (Hall), chapter 27 (Solow), and chapter 28 (Phelps).
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Michael Spagat (2004) studied this question.