Quotes from Paul Romer

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.

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.

It is the job of government to prevent a tragedy of the commons. That includes the commons of shared values and norms on which democracy depends.

My number-one recommendation is to invest in people. Humans that are well trained are the inputs into this discovery process. And there's big opportunities still, I think, to do a better job of investing in people.

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.

If two firms join together, we want their total tax bill to go up because we don't want more big firms. We'd actually like to have lots more small ones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

What happens at the Fed, what Janet Yellen and the other people decide there, what happens in central banks in other parts of the world is very important. This can make the difference between a high unemployment rate, a slow recovery or a more rapid recovery.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Rules about public sanitation are a simple and familiar example. Without them, a city can't be a healthy place to live; but these rules don't just happen. The rules for a city are different from the ones for a village, but as a village slowly gets bigger, a city may be stuck with the rules of the village.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.