Paul Romer: belief

Transcript context

…Last question thread, what did you learn at Burning Man? Sometimes physical presence is necessary to appreciate something like scale. The scale of everything at Burning Man was just totally unexpected, a total surprise for me, even having looked at all of these pictures and so forth. That was one. Another thing that really stood out, which is not exactly a surprise, but maybe it was the surprise in that group — if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do? They work. What people do at Burning Man is they go there and they work. They’ll do a different job, like they’ll work as part of the volunteer police force, or they’ll help maintain sanitation. They’ll work to set up something which offers a service to other people. But there’s enormous satisfaction that we draw from accomplishment and the provision of the output that we produce, making it available to others. If somebody asked me, “What’s a post-scarcity society going to look like?” Somebody actually said this to me there. He was like, “What does post-scarcity society look like? ” People work hard because they like it. They work on things that they care about and they think others will care about, and that’s an encouraging insight, I think, about people. We can leave it at that. Paul Romer, thank you very much. Hope we can do this again someday.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.