Paul Romer
Economist
1955-11-06
Quotes by Paul Romer
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A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
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A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I'd rather live in a world where firms don't have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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