Quotes from Paul Romer

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.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Well, one of the things I should tell you is that if you look at the very long sweep of history what you see is that the rate of growth has been speeding up, the rate of progress, and that's because there's more and more people who are all engaged in this process of discovery.

An economy can survive with 10% of the population insolation. It can't survive when 50% of the population is in isolation.

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.

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.

After 1960, anyone who wanted to discuss almost any aspect of U.S. public policy - from how to make cars safer to whether to abolish the draft, from how to support the housing market to whether to regulate the financial sector - had to speak economics.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

But if we set our minds to improving technology, we can improve it in a direction that seems important to us and even at a faster rate.

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.

From the very beginning, Americans have refused to tolerate unchecked power. We must now press our legislators to protect us from the unchecked power of dominant digital platforms.

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.

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

For a nation, the choices that determine whether income doubles in one generation or two dwarf all other economic policy concerns.

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.

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.

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.

We live in a much more interconnected world now, and that means that it's more fragile than we realize.