52 Quotes by Paul Romer

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.

If two firms join together, we want their total tax bill to go up because we don't want more big firms. We'd actually like to have lots more small ones.

But the point of a progressive revenue tax is that you create incentives both for breakups, you penalize the acquisitions, and you encourage the development of models where the customers are customers and they know what they're giving up.

I'd rather live in a world where firms don't have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals.

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.

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.

What happens at the Fed, what Janet Yellen and the other people decide there, what happens in central banks in other parts of the world is very important. This can make the difference between a high unemployment rate, a slow recovery or a more rapid recovery.