Paul Romer quotes

Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material. (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. View quote
Paul Romer
Ideas can be used by many people at the same time. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
The amazing thing about cities is that they're worth so much more than it costs to build them. View quote
Paul Romer
One problem today is that people think protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they want to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. Humans are capable of amazing accomplishments if we set our minds to it. View quote
Paul Romer
The question that I first asked was, why was progress... speeding up over time? It arises because of this special characteristic of an idea, which is if [a million people try] to discover something, if any one person finds it, everybody can use the idea. View quote
Paul Romer
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. View quote
Paul Romer
Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem. I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something. View quote
Paul Romer
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. (Paul Romer)
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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? View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. (Paul Romer)
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. View quote
Paul Romer
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. View quote
Paul Romer
We live in a much more interconnected world now, and that means that it's more fragile than we realize. View quote
Paul Romer
When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done. View quote
Paul Romer