Quoting Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for the year 2006. The citation reads in part, "... for his analysis of the intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy". Ralph Atkins of the Financial Times interviewed the laureate and notes that his intellectual search is not over and he comfortably expresses his doubts about the assumptions regarding equilibrium. he attributes the following quote to Prof. Phelps.

” Traditional economics, he explains, sees the world as if it were a plumbing system. “It’s basically rooted in equilibrium – things work out as people expect them to do.” Capitalist reality, however, “is a system of disorder. Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity, they don’t know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be – there is the law of unanticipated consequences. This is not in the economic text books, and my mission, late in my career, is to get it into the text books.”- Edmund Phelps