Welcome to a curated collection of insightful quotes by Paul Romer, an esteemed economist and Nobel laureate whose work has profoundly influenced our understanding of economic growth and innovation. Romer’s ideas have left an indelible mark on the field of economics, particularly through his contributions to endogenous growth theory and his advocacy for the role of technological innovation in driving long-term economic development.
As a pioneer in the study of innovation and its impact on economic progress, Paul Romer has offered profound insights into how ideas, knowledge, and creativity can be harnessed to foster prosperity and improve living standards. His research highlights the crucial role that policies, institutions, and incentives play in encouraging innovation and fostering an environment conducive to sustained economic growth.
Below, you’ll find a selection of Paul Romer’s most thought-provoking quotes, which delve into various aspects of economics, innovation, and development. These quotes serve as a source of inspiration and contemplation, whether you’re a student of economics, a policymaker, an entrepreneur, or simply curious about the forces driving the world’s economies. Feel free to utilize these quotes in presentations, social media posts, or any other creative endeavors to share and explore Romer’s profound insights.
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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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? 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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. 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
When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
Ideas can be used by many people at the same time. 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. 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
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. 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. 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. Paul Romer
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. 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. Paul Romer
An economy can survive with 10% of the population insolation. It can’t survive when 50% of the population is in isolation. Paul Romer
We live in a much more interconnected world now, and that means that it’s more fragile than we realize. 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. Paul Romer
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. 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. Paul Romer
Charter Cities has been approached in many different ways, by many people acting as individuals or as representatives of organizations. Paul Romer
I’d rather live in a world where firms don’t have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. 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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
For a nation, the choices that determine whether income doubles in one generation or two dwarf all other economic policy concerns. 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. 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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
So human capital makes ideas, and ideas help make human capital. But still, they’re conceptually distinct. Paul Romer
A progressive digital ad revenue tax would also make sure that dominant social media platforms bear the brunt of the tax. 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. 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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
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. 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. Paul Romer
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. 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? 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. Paul Romer
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. Paul Romer
