Paul Romer

American economist (born 1955)

Paul Michael Romer (born November 7, 1955) is an American economist, a pioneer of endogenous growth theory, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He received the prize "for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis". He previously served as Chief Economist of the World Bank between 2016 and 2018.

Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.

Quotes

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  • A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
    • Discussing rapidly-increasing education levels and competition from countries outside of the United States in a 2004 venture capital meeting in California, as quoted in "A Terrible Thing to Waste." The New York Times Magazine. July 31, 2009.
About the quote: Even though Romer made this statement approximately four years before the 2008 Financial Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession, policy makers repeated the idea frequently during the Crisis and the Recession as a reminder that necessary economic and financial reforms which were previously politically impossible were now quite feasible. (See, for example, "A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste," Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 21, 2010).
  • We've maintained accelerating growth over time [in part because of] changes in our institutions. We have things like universities . . . patent laws, [and] research grants which have created incentives for those individuals [who develop innovations] to engage in more discovery. . . . [T]he rules of the game create incentives . . .
  • Presenting a model is like doing a card trick. Everybody knows that there will be some sleight of hand. There is no intent to deceive because no one takes it seriously. Perhaps our norms will soon be like those in professional magic; it will be impolite, perhaps even an ethical breach, to reveal how someone’s trick works.[1]
  • 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.


Quotes about Romer

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  • You will almost never see an economist whom the academics themselves regard as important or interesting. For example, niether Robert Lucas, without question the most influential economic theorist of the 1970s, nor Paul Romer, arguably the most influential theorist of the 1980s, has ever appeared on any public affairs program.
    • Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity (1994), Introduction: Looking for Magicians
  • Paul's insight is that the infrastructure for creating new ideas is the engine room of economic growth. So we need to pay attention to patents, the number of scientists that are out there, the incentives to do science. And as long as we can keep generating new ideas, we can keep generating economic growth.
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Wikipedia
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  1. What's Wrong With 'Mathiness' in Economics?. Bloomberg Opinion (May 20, 2015). Retrieved on September 6, 2019.