Words matter. These are the best Paul Romer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The thing that was bad about colonialism, and the thing which is residually bad in some of our aid programs, is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension.
Charter Cities has been approached in many different ways, by many people acting as individuals or as representatives of organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 progressive digital ad revenue tax would also make sure that dominant social media platforms bear the brunt of the tax.
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.
An economy can survive with 10% of the population insolation. It can’t survive when 50% of the population is in isolation.
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.
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.
