When I was first starting grad school, if you had asked 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 most... public policy can affect those choices.

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

but there's still a little part of me that wishes like 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 as 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 on 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 so now you're an economist who has taken the insights of economics

way beyond the classroom which we'll get to but first I wanted to talk a little bit about your approached economics because myself I've always been heavily driven by empirics and by data

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