52 Quotes by Paul Romer

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.

So human capital makes ideas, and ideas help make human capital. But still, they're conceptually distinct.

Since the fall of 2010, people associated with Charter Cities, a not-for-profit think tank that I founded, have been providing pro bono advice to the government of Honduras.

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.

Fracking is an amazing instance of discovery of many things that come together to make it much cheaper to extract oil and gas. In a world where burning oil and gas puts more and more carbon into the atmosphere, it's not actually the most important kind of innovation to have.

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.

Ideas can be used by many people at the same time.

For an investment banker, the choice between a payment that doubles with every square on the chessboard and one that doubles with every other square is more important than any other part of the contract. Who cares whether the payment is in pennies, pounds, or pesos?

If you go back to the really long-run questions that interested me, the big question was why, over the centuries, the millennia, has growth been speeding up?