Top 33 Paul Romer Quotes

For an investment banker, the choice between a payment that doubles with every square on the chessboard and one that doubles with every other square is more important than any other part of the contract. Who cares whether the payment is in pennies, pounds, or pesos?

In the 1950s, Hong Kong was a place where millions of people could go, from the mainland, to start in jobs like sewing shirts, making toys. But, to get on a process of increasing income, increasing skills led to very rapid growth there.

A progressive digital ad revenue tax would also make sure that dominant social media platforms bear the brunt of the tax.

No one from Charter Cities, can have any financial interest in any project in Honduras; no one can accept consulting fees from the Honduran government; no one can accept reimbursement for travel expenses or accommodations; no one can provide advice to any for-profit entity that wants to invest in Honduras.

People are reasonably good at estimating how things add up, but for compounding, which involved repeated multiplication, we fail to appreciate how quickly things grow.

But the point of a progressive revenue tax is that you create incentives both for breakups, you penalize the acquisitions, and you encourage the development of models where the customers are customers and they know what they’re giving up.

Yeah, but look, who really provided the world’s information to everybody on Earth? That was Wikipedia, right? And if you’re asking what could we do to make the digital world work for people, the Wikipedia model is great. It’s a donation model.

So you could have a very institutionally well-developed economy that’s still very low in terms of its technological success. That would be unexpected.

The gains from specialization go all the way back to Adam Smith. He talked about the advantage of a bigger market being that we could have a finer division of labor and be more specialized.

Good law includes a commitment to transparency and an insistence that no person or entity with a conflict of interest should have influence on public policy decisions.

I’d rather live in a world where firms don’t have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals.

Ideas can be used by many people at the same time.

Since the fall of 2010, people associated with Charter Cities, a not-for-profit think tank that I founded, have been providing pro bono advice to the government of Honduras.

Existing antitrust law in the United States addresses mainly the harm from price gouging, not the other kinds of harm caused by these platforms, such as stifling innovation and undermining the institutions of democracy.

In macroeconomic theory, there is this argument that what the Fed does has no effect on unemployment, no effect on investment, no effect on the rate of GDP growth.

If we collectively set our minds to improving technology of a particular type we can do that, and it takes some collective action, some support for research, or some provision of patent protection, or a mixture of the two, and some focussed energy.

In the developing world, most people don’t yet live in big well-run cities. Given the chance to move to one, hundreds of millions of people would go there to get a job, get an education for their children, and live in a place that is clean, safe, and healthy.

One of the most powerful insights in economics is this idea of a division of labor. You do the thing you’re good at. Other people do something else that they’re good at. The net effect is better for everybody.

A well-run city lets millions of people come together and enjoy the benefit they can get from working together and trading with each other.

Charter Cities has been approached in many different ways, by many people acting as individuals or as representatives of organizations.

When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done.

The general message is about a bigger global integrated economy is going to lead to faster growth, that policy could improve efficiency by getting more research going.

Yeah, you know, there’s a difference between the textbook world that economists like to imagine, and the real world where real people have real feelings.

When somebody discovers something like the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean theorem, the convention in science is that he can’t control that idea. He has to give it away. He publishes it. What’s rewarded in science is dissemination of ideas.

What we’ve underestimated is the systemic risk that that very finely tuned system of specialization exposes us to. And so I think we will start to ask whether there are ways that we could build some more robustness into our whole system.

The economy is this huge innovation discovery machine. What the government can do usefully is to focus some of that effort where things turn out better for everyone.

If you go back to the really long-run questions that interested me, the big question was why, over the centuries, the millennia, has growth been speeding up?

Unfortunately, we don’t have a bankruptcy process. Suppose the state actually just gets to the point where it cannot meet all of its promises that it’s made. We might need a way to figure out, O.K., well, who’s not going to get what they were promised? This is what we had to do for the city of Detroit.

But when I think about, say, a pharmaceutical that might help keep my mind sharp in 20 years or 30 years, I don’t care if it’s discovered in the United States or someplace else in the world.

There are many signs of the value created by all the exchange that takes place in a city. We see it in productivity and wage data. We also see it in the increase in the value of the land.

There are new things we need to do in the labor market, in education, and in thinking about the future of energy sources. As long as we do those things everything really can turn out fine. But if we don’t do them, we’re going to be disappointed.

So human capital makes ideas, and ideas help make human capital. But still, they’re conceptually distinct.

Fracking is an amazing instance of discovery of many things that come together to make it much cheaper to extract oil and gas. In a world where burning oil and gas puts more and more carbon into the atmosphere, it’s not actually the most important kind of innovation to have.