… is from pages 302-303 of 2006 Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps’s 2013 book, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change:
By 1970 social critics in the West envisioned a new sort of economy that would pay a lower price for the good life. The new economy was supposed to offer the prospect of substantial economic stability. But the economies that continental Western Europe claimed to be buffered against instability through heavy job protection and large public sectors, such as those in continental Western Europe, had nothing to show for it: They had low employment and major slumps. And they have paid a steep price: They have little or no dynamism and, as a consequence, underdevelopment, low employment, and not necessarily stable employment at that.
