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Edmund “Ned” Phelps, the man who helped explain why inflation expectations are crucial to macroeconomic stability, died last week at the age of 92.
经济学家埃德蒙•菲尔普斯（昵称“内德”）于上周逝世，享年92岁；他帮助解释了为什么通胀预期对宏观经济稳定至关重要。
In the late 1960s, Phelps wrote two groundbreaking articles which contained the work for which he would later be awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics.
在20世纪60年代末，菲尔普斯发表了两篇开创性论文，其中包含了他后来获得2006年诺贝尔经济学奖的研究成果。
The breakthrough in the first, published in the journal Economica in 1967, highlighted the role of people’s expectations in setting wages and prices. Phelps argued that if people expected higher inflation, workers would ask for higher wages and managers would raise their prices. The result would be a wage-price spiral.
第一篇论文1967年发表于《Economica》期刊，其突破在于突出了人们对未来的预期在决定工资和物价方面所起的作用。菲尔普斯认为，如果人们预期通胀会上升，工人就会要求更高的工资，管理者也会提高价格。其结果将是工资—物价螺旋式上升。
In such a scenario, Phelps insisted, the best policy for the monetary authorities would be to bring those expectations down, even if it meant raising interest rates at the expense — at least temporarily — of jobs.
菲尔普斯坚持认为，在这种情况下，货币当局的最佳政策就是压低这种预期，即便这意味着要提高利率，哪怕暂时以就业为代价。
The second paper, published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1968, argued that attempts by central banks to maintain employment above its equilibrium level would end in an inflationary upsurge.
第二篇论文于1968年发表在《政治经济学期刊》上，认为如果中央银行试图将就业维持在高于其均衡水平的状态，最终会引发通胀激增。
Orthodox Keynesians had thought that higher inflation was a price worth paying for lower unemployment. But this idea was abandoned after the experience with high and unstable inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s.
正统凯恩斯主义者曾认为，为了降低失业率，更高的通货膨胀是值得付出的代价。但在经历了20世纪70年代和80年代初高而不稳定的通胀之后，这一理念被放弃了。
Phelps could consider himself vindicated. As he noted in his Nobel address, his 1967 paper was the intellectual ancestor of the inflation targeting that guides central banking to this day. As he put it: “Inflation will still be capable of ups and downs, but it cannot go far if the expected inflation rate is under control.”
菲尔普斯可以认为自己得到了证明。正如他在诺贝尔奖演讲中指出的，他1967年的论文是如今仍在引导各国央行的通胀目标制的思想源头。正如他所说：“通胀仍然可能有起伏，但如果对通胀的预期被控制住了，它就不可能偏离太远。”
The faith in central bankers’ capacity to keep inflation expectations under control is widely considered to have enabled them to steer the global economy towards a soft landing after the Covid-19 pandemic.
普遍认为，人们对央行有能力控制通胀预期的信心，使各国央行在新冠疫情之后得以引导全球经济实现软着陆。
Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1933, Phelps grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he played lead trumpet in his high school band. He went on to attend Amherst, where he focused on humanities before turning to economics. He did his PhD at Yale, where he came under the tutelage of James Tobin, an intellectual leader of American Keynesians and a Nobel laureate.
菲尔普斯1933年出生于伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿，在纽约州哈得孙河畔黑斯廷斯镇长大，就读高中时是校乐队的首席小号手。此后他进入阿默斯特学院，先专攻人文学科，后来转向经济学。他在耶鲁大学攻读博士学位，师从美国凯恩斯主义阵营的思想领袖、诺贝尔奖得主詹姆斯•托宾。
Phelps researched and taught at Yale until 1966. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote the papers that made him famous. He moved to Columbia University in the summer of 1971, where he met his future wife Viviana Montdor. They married in 1974.
菲尔普斯在耶鲁从事研究和教学工作直到1966年。随后，他转到宾夕法尼亚大学，在那里撰写了让他名声大噪的论文。1971年夏天，他又来到哥伦比亚大学，并在那里结识了他未来的妻子维维安娜•蒙多尔。两人于1974年结婚。
The contributions by Phelps came at around the same time Milton Friedman was establishing the concept of a “natural rate of unemployment”. But Phelps was not awarded the Nobel Prize until 2006 — weeks after the death of Friedman, who had become a laureate 30 years earlier.
菲尔普斯的贡献出现在大致同一时期，当时米尔顿•弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)正在提出“自然失业率”的概念。但直到2006年，菲尔普斯才获颁诺贝尔奖——那是在弗里德曼去世数周之后，而弗里德曼早在30年前就已经成为诺奖得主。
Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the IMF, told the FT that “Phelps, along with Friedman, argued that central banks can largely dictate long-run inflation but have little control over long-run average output growth. Modern-day research has qualified these results in some important dimensions but they remain a core starting point for discussion.”
哈佛大学经济学家、国际货币基金组织(IMF)前首席经济学家肯尼思•罗戈夫在接受英国《金融时报》采访时表示：“菲尔普斯与弗里德曼一起提出，央行在很大程度上可以决定长期通胀水平，但对长期平均产出增速几乎无能为力。现代研究在一些重要维度上对这些结论作出了修正，但这些观点仍然是讨论问题的核心出发点。”
Olivier Blanchard, also a former chief economist of the IMF, adds that “his style was highly idiosyncratic . . . He did not listen much to others, pursuing his agenda with focus and passion.”
曾在国际货币基金组织担任首席经济学家的奥利维尔•布兰查德(Olivier Blanchard)补充说：“他的风格极具个人色彩……他不太听取他人的意见，而是专注而热情地推进自己的议程。”
Prior to his seminal contributions to macroeconomics, Phelps published papers on the “Golden Rule” of capital formation. The aim, he said, should be to maximise what economists call “steady-state” consumption per head. To achieve this, the savings rate should equal the share of income going to capital.
在对宏观经济学作出奠基性贡献之前，菲尔普斯发表过关于资本形成“黄金法则”的论文。他表示，目标应当是使经济学家所说的人均“稳态”消费最大化。要实现这一点，储蓄率应当等于收入中归属于资本的份额。
Phelps was committed to understanding the social, political and philosophical context for markets. In 1997, he published the book Rewarding Work, in which he argued for wage subsidies as a way of ensuring that prosperity could be better shared.
菲尔普斯致力于理解市场运行的社会、政治和哲学背景。1997年，他出版了《工作的回报》一书，主张通过工资补贴来确保繁荣成果能够更好地被共享。
He was founding director of the Center for Capitalism and Society at Columbia, from 2001 to its closure in 2024. In 2013 he published the book Mass Flourishing, a statement of his belief that “modern values” — a shared desire to create, explore and meet challenges — were the wellsprings of economic dynamism, but were being lost.
2001年至该中心于2024年关闭期间，他担任哥伦比亚大学资本主义与社会中心的创始主任。2013年，他出版了《大众繁荣》一书，系统阐述了自己的观点：所谓“现代价值观”——即人们共同创造、探索并迎接挑战的愿望——是经济活力的源泉，但正日益流失。
“That he remained so engaged in thinking, writing and debating till so late in life — another parallel to Friedman — is an inspiration to all of us in the profession,” says Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago.
芝加哥大学的拉古拉姆•拉詹表示：“他在生命的晚年依然如此投入于思考、写作和辩论——这一点也是与弗里德曼的另一个相似之处——这对我们整个学界都是一种激励。”