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Paul Romer

Published podcast speaker

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27
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2
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1
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1

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book / likes

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“I loved the intricacy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, the subtlety of the emotions and the manipulation of the emotions in this spy story.”

Conversations with Tyler · 5 Dec 2018

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What Paul said.

27 transcript-backed records

01 / belief

How long should they be isolated, both from other players but also from the general public? But if we just put together the plan, I think we could safely restart baseball and do it with confidence, knowing that we’re not going to increase the number of infections.

“How long should they be isolated, both from other players but also from the general public? But if we just put together the plan, I think we could safely restart baseball and do it with confidence, knowing that we’re not going to increase the number of infections.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

02 / belief

” 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.

“” 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.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

04 / belief

If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little.

“If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

05 / belief

People in the Bank could tell that research was dysfunctional there, but shortly after I arrived, the number two, who I think had been behind this initiative, left to go take a position back in finance minister in Indonesia, and a different number two came into the Bank.

“People in the Bank could tell that research was dysfunctional there, but shortly after I arrived, the number two, who I think had been behind this initiative, left to go take a position back in finance minister in Indonesia, and a different number two came into the Bank.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

07 / recommendation

I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day, and let them start playing games in empty stadiums, because you need a lot more tests to test the fans, to have them come in.

“I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day, and let them start playing games in empty stadiums, because you need a lot more tests to test the fans, to have them come in.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

08 / evaluation

If I have a criticism of macro in economics, it’s like the criticism in epidemiology — we may have biased things a little bit too much towards the models, and we’re not giving enough weight to just the facts themselves. And I think that’s because it’s actually easier to do models than to look at data, so we need to have a little bit of collective pressure to, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what your theory says, but let’s look at the numbers.

“If I have a criticism of macro in economics, it’s like the criticism in epidemiology — we may have biased things a little bit too much towards the models, and we’re not giving enough weight to just the facts themselves. And I think that’s because it’s actually easier to do models than to look at data, so we need to have a little bit of collective pressure to, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what your theory says, but let’s look at the numbers.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

09 / preference

I agree that if you can target tests effectively, then you don’t have to test as many people because really all you have to do is find enough positives and get them into isolation.

“I agree that if you can target tests effectively, then you don’t have to test as many people because really all you have to do is find enough positives and get them into isolation.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

10 / prediction

My hunch is that China will eventually realize that the way to pay for the infrastructure that it’s building as part of this Belt and Road program is to do urban real estate development.

“My hunch is that China will eventually realize that the way to pay for the infrastructure that it’s building as part of this Belt and Road program is to do urban real estate development.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

11 / evaluation

Yeah. But the origins of that article were that I read some books that said economists got a lot more influence and things got worse in the United States, and this was a really troubling argument for me because it’s not easy to dismiss.

“Yeah. But the origins of that article were that I read some books that said economists got a lot more influence and things got worse in the United States, and this was a really troubling argument for me because it’s not easy to dismiss.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

12 / recommendation

You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that, instead of litigating, somebody who’s harmed by taking a vaccine — because there’s a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect — there’s a separate compensation mechanism.

“You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that, instead of litigating, somebody who’s harmed by taking a vaccine — because there’s a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect — there’s a separate compensation mechanism.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

13 / evaluation

The upshot is, is that I think because of technical economics and the arguments of economists, antitrust is much more tolerant now of dominant firms, and if we believe that competition’s good in a whole bunch of ways, this could actually be very, very harmful.

“The upshot is, is that I think because of technical economics and the arguments of economists, antitrust is much more tolerant now of dominant firms, and if we believe that competition’s good in a whole bunch of ways, this could actually be very, very harmful.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

14 / recommendation

I spent time in Honduras. They were actually willing to try this, but what I think, in retrospect, I should have done, and what I’ll do now, is go first to the countries which are willing to help set something up because a country like Honduras was not — the reason it was willing to do something radical like a new charter city was that it did not have the internal capacity to do something like a charter city.

“I spent time in Honduras. They were actually willing to try this, but what I think, in retrospect, I should have done, and what I’ll do now, is go first to the countries which are willing to help set something up because a country like Honduras was not — the reason it was willing to do something radical like a new charter city was that it did not have the internal capacity to do something like a charter city.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

17 / commitment

Maybe it did, relative to what growth would’ve been in the absence of the internet. It’s also possible that it will have an effect on output that we won’t see for 10, 20 years.

“Maybe it did, relative to what growth would’ve been in the absence of the internet. It’s also possible that it will have an effect on output that we won’t see for 10, 20 years.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

19 / evaluation

I think that the problem in higher ed is that the institutional incentives don’t provide the kind of training that would maximize the opportunities for the students or, for that matter, maximize outcomes for the nation.

“I think that the problem in higher ed is that the institutional incentives don’t provide the kind of training that would maximize the opportunities for the students or, for that matter, maximize outcomes for the nation.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

21 / evaluation

We’ll need more than one dimension to really characterize different economies. But all of that said, I found, at least when I started to think about problems — which is really the best test of a theory — that I needed a different theoretical apparatus to think about, say, the challenge in Tanzania than the challenge in Germany.

“We’ll need more than one dimension to really characterize different economies. But all of that said, I found, at least when I started to think about problems — which is really the best test of a theory — that I needed a different theoretical apparatus to think about, say, the challenge in Tanzania than the challenge in Germany.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

22 / recommendation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

23 / commitment

Actually, at one point, I wrote a paper called “Thinking and Feeling” that was really my first venture into trying to say, “We have some sense of why growth is possible and what could determine the long sweep of history.

“Actually, at one point, I wrote a paper called “Thinking and Feeling” that was really my first venture into trying to say, “We have some sense of why growth is possible and what could determine the long sweep of history.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

24 / evaluation

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?

“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?”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

26 / prediction

That may give you a less optimistic answer than, say, the initial take I had. But it may still be the case that we can have growth, that we can sustain it partly by having more and more people go into something like research because there’s 10 or 11 billion people we’ll end up with, and we can increase the fraction of people who go into that.

“That may give you a less optimistic answer than, say, the initial take I had. But it may still be the case that we can have growth, that we can sustain it partly by having more and more people go into something like research because there’s 10 or 11 billion people we’ll end up with, and we can increase the fraction of people who go into that.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

27 / evaluation

” Because of the norms that evolve in these conditions of inequality, I think that is going to prove to be a very damaging approach for both the migrants who arrive and the people in the existing society.

“” Because of the norms that evolve in these conditions of inequality, I think that is going to prove to be a very damaging approach for both the migrants who arrive and the people in the existing society.”
Speaker
Paul Romer
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler
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