Paul Romer: evaluation

Transcript context

…And deeply curious. Yeah, and it turns out, things he was thinking about . . . I was referring before to abstraction and how we use abstraction to communicate. He was very thoughtful about that and had a much more sophisticated sense about how science proceeds than the positivist sort of machine that people describe. But one of the joys of reading — that’s not a novel — but one of the joys of reading, and to me slightly frightening thing, is that there’s so much out there, and that a hundred years later, you can discover somebody who has so many things to say that can be helpful for somebody like me trying to understand, how do we use abstraction? How do we communicate clearly? He started this field of semiotics, of this connection between the sign and the concept and the distinction between those two. I used to think things like that were academics worrying about angels on the head of a pin, but this is actually a really profoundly important distinction to pay attention to. But the joy of scholarship — I think it’s a joy of maybe any life in the modern world — that through reading, we can get access to the thoughts of another person, and then you can sample from the thoughts that are most relevant to you or that are the most powerful in some sense. That’s really the foundation for the transmission of knowledge and growth and this whole process. I should read probably a little bit more widely in fiction, but I find somebody like Peirce — my reaction is, I’m going to quit everything else and just go read the nonfiction stuff because there’s so much out there that I didn’t even know about. Two last questions about you. First, you grew up in the mountains when so many of the powerful people are on the coasts. How has that shaped your life and thought?…

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