When I was first starting grad school, if you would ask me which economist I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said Paul Romer.

He was the hot-shot young economist at the time who was transforming the field of macroeconomics with his breakthrough ideas.

Well, it only took one graduate-level macroeconomics course for me to figure out

that I was not going to be the next Paul Romer. Turned out I had no talent or intuition at all for

the issues covered by macroeconomics, topics like inflation and fiscal policy, central banks,

and economic growth. Instead, I turned my attention to microeconomics, the study of

incentives and why people make the choices they make and how public policy can affect those choices.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt. My life as an economist has turned out pretty

great, but there's still a little part of me

that wishes I could have been Paul Romer. Not only has he won the Nobel Prize for his academic

breakthroughs, but he also managed to launch a successful tech company and serve his chief

economist for the World Bank. So today, talking with Paul Romer, I'm talking to one of my heroes.

What makes me a little nervous, though, heading into this interview, is the fact that many of his ideas are very abstract, and I think my biggest challenge will be how can I get

him to express those ideas in a simple enough way that regular people can understand?

And to be honest, since I barely understand macroeconomics myself,

if I don't do a good job in this interview, I'm going to be sitting here scratching my head,

just like the people listening.

I feel really lucky to have the chance to talk to you today.

Thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, well, it's a treat.

And I feel remiss that we haven't connected before,

but I think for much of my life, I have to go by better late than never.

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