Yeah, technology. What is it all about?

The point is that if we get ourselves in a hole we can't get out of, it's going to be our own fault.

There's nothing about the economics right now that means that we can't, you know, work our way out of where we are.

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley. Thank you for tuning in.

I'm your host, Danny Forts in the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times.

And we're going to do something a little different this week.

So you may recall, right when the pandemic broke out, we mixed it up a bit and brought on a bunch

of different guests who could provide kind of different perspectives on just what the hell was happening in the world.

To the economy and the tech industry, et cetera, it's kind of everything. And one of the folks I

had on at the time was Paul Romer, who was a Nobel Prize winning economist. He was also

formerly the World Bank's chief economist.

So I figured he was a good person to ask because at the time much of the West of course was

going into shutdown and to lockdown as well as pushing to these massive stimulus packages.

Just we were swimming in debt and everybody was trying to kind of freaking

out, trying to figure out what was going on. And I wanted to ask him kind of what's the path

forward here, how he saw this playing out, how he thought it should play out, economically speaking.

So six months on, it is safe to say that things have not gone according to uh well anyone's plan um the UK is going

back into soft lockdown the US we just passed 200,000 people who have died from COVID. We're still,

of course, some way away from a vaccine. In terms of policy, no one seems to have really

got a good handle, at least in the West, on how to get back to life and to work in a kind of

a sensible, workable way. So I wanted to bring Paul back to just to get his thoughts on the past

six months, the kind of the state of the economy now, trying to separate

...