Paul Romer on the Unrivaled Joy of Scholarship
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2018
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Throughout his career, Paul Romer has enjoyed sampling and sifting through an ever-growing body of knowledge. He sometimes jokingly refers to himself as a random idea generator, relying on others to filter out the bad ones so his contributions are good. Not a bad strategy, as it turns out, for starting a successful business and winning a Nobel Prize.
Just before accepting that Prize, he joined Tyler for a conversation spanning one filtered set of those ideas, including the best policies for growth and innovation, his new thinking on the trilemma facing migration, how to rework higher education, general-purpose technologies, unlocking the power of reading for all kids, fixes for the English language, what economics misses about the ‘inside of the head,’ whether he’s a Jane Jacobs or Gouverneur Morris type, what Kanban taught him about management, his recent sampling of Pierce’s semiotics, Clarence White vs. Gram Parsons, his favorite Hot Tuna song, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded November 14th, 2018
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:08.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:12.6 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:15.2 | And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit |
| 0:20.4 | ConversationsWithT Tyler.com. |
| 0:28.5 | And today I am here with Paul Romer, who just won a Nobel Prize in Economics. |
| 0:33.2 | Hello, Paul. |
| 0:34.2 | It's great to be here, Tyler. |
| 0:35.5 | Let's start in on the topic of economic growth. |
| 0:38.0 | Sure. |
| 0:39.0 | Shouldn't the Internet have boosted economic growth more? |
| 0:41.6 | Well, you would have expected it to. |
| 0:44.4 | Maybe it did relative to what growth would have been in the absence of the Internet. |
| 0:50.6 | It's also possible that it will have an effect on output that we won't see for 10-20 years. |
| 0:55.7 | This is the kind of story that Paul David tells about electricity. |
| 1:00.5 | So, and it also may be that it's giving us benefits that we're not measuring very well. |
| 1:07.3 | But of course, other technologies in the past could have given us benefits that we're not |
| 1:11.4 | selling. |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.4 | So, I think it's a bit of a puzzle right now that people feel both that boy, we have too |
| 1:18.9 | much technological change to manage, but yet we're not getting enough growth. |
| 1:23.0 | If we look at say five-year moving averages, at least measured growth seems to be slowing |
... |
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