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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Charter Cities has been approached in many different ways, by many people acting as individuals or as representatives of organizations.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”