YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Romer

lines on the record: 72
first: 2020-05-20
most recent: 2020-05-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Work, you know, what people do at Burning Man is they go there and they work, they'll do a different job like they'll work as you know part of the volunteer police force or they'll help just maintain sanitation they'll work to set up something which offers a service to other people But there's enormous satisfaction that we draw from accomplishment and production and the provision of the output that we produce making it available to others. So if somebody asked me well what's a post scarcity society going to look like if somebody actually said this to me there it's like what is post scarcity society look like people work hard because they like it they work on things that they they care about they think others will care about and and that's kind of an encouraging insight I think about people”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh. Sometimes physical presence is necessary to appreciate something like scale. The scale of everything at Burning Man was just totally unexpected, a total surprise for me. Even having looked at all of these pictures and so forth. That was one. Another thing that really stood out, it's not really not exactly a surprise, but maybe it was a surprise in that group. If you ask, what do people do? If you put them in a setting where there's supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week, what do they do?”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yep, that's true. That's true. And of course, no, so what am I going to cite to support that? A piece of nonfiction. There's a colleague of mine at NYU who'd served as dean for many years. So he looked at a large sample of promotion cases. And he then tried to generalize, what are the differences between the humanities and the sciences? What makes these things tick? Where are they similar? Where are they different? And he wrote a really nice book called The Geography of Insight that talks about what's distinctive about humanities as opposed to sciences and how they both contribute to a better understanding of the world that we live in.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you know, we have a division of labor in my house. My wife is the one who you should ask about French fiction. She's right now, her goal is to get me to read any fiction at all. I'm heavily biased towards nonfiction. And she's trying to broaden my horizons a little bit.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tradition that the one that was most beneficial, I tried to say this about kind of Old Testament values and somebody accused me of being anti-Semitic. And I was talking about Christianity and I was actually saying it was good. So I don't really quite understand. But one has to be a little careful when you talk about these issues.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very good question. I speculated in one group meeting about there's a difference between the kind of the Old Testament version of Christianity and the New Testament version. And my conjecture was that some of the Old Testament norms were closer to the ones that matter for science. Christianity really succeeded by competing with other religions, partly because it brought in redemption, forgiveness. You know, it was a softer the kind of the New Testament version of Christianity was a softer, kinder form of Christianity. It may be the older form of Christianity, which is a tradition shared with Judaism, where there was kind of a little bit more strictness about truth and integrity and more harmful consequences from violations of that. It may actually be that early”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Country around the world, it's worth thinking about if you're short on that, if there's a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what's true, you know, if there's kind of norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my predecessors at the World Bank, as chief economist Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn't China develop the industrial revolution? And his argument is basically that China, because there were so many people looking and discovering, they discovered a lot of things like gunpowder, steel, printing, so forth. But what China didn't do was invent the social system we call science. So they had some knowledge and some technology. They didn't invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science. So I found that argument really compelling. And I've taken it one step further and think that, you know, part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust and that science indirectly gave us those things. So I think for any...”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But so I think we may have underestimated the value of science. And so it's all the more important to support it. So it isn't just that it gives us some facts that feed into a discussion. It conveys norms about integrity. And also there's a harsh side to this that when you are found to have misled people intentionally, those norms say you're no longer taken seriously. You're excluded. You're not respected or listened to anymore. But those kinds of things are critical, I think, for supporting trust. And I think that we should learn how to protect science and get it to do its job better in building those norms and encouraging trust.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, yep. So I think when you think about this level of norms, a commitment that it's a good thing to be honest, it's a good thing to be disapproving of people who are found not to be honest. That's very helpful because it helps build trust. And trust is an important part of...”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And telling the truth became something that was valued. Science may have actually been more important than we realize for that.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah. Oh, well, because I'm really interested in science. And I think he was a very deep thinker about science from this kind of pragmatic perspective of how does it work, what does it accomplish, how can we get more of, how can we get more of that? It was Tim Besley, actually, another economist pointed me to him. I have to say it's heavy-going to read his stuff, but I'm still quite, quite interested. If you go back to what we were saying before about what could an existing successful society bring when it sets up a new one, I used to think a lot about, and this is economist we talked a lot about, you know, like the rule of law. And as law is in some sense the basis for things like honesty and trust, I'm starting to think that science may have actually been more important for the West in developing a culture where a reputation for integrity”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me from doing this, so I finally figured it out, said I was going to resign. They told me, oh no, it do enormous damage to the bank if you resigned. And I still took what they said seriously. So then I went out and just got myself fired. I gave an interview in the Wall Street Journal, which I knew would make them mad. And then they said, okay, well, you broke the rules. So we have to have an investigation. I said, no, no, you don't have to have an investigation. I broke the rules. I said, okay, well, then you have to put you on administrative leave and you have to sign this agreement where you won't say anything without our approvals. I'm not going to do that. And then they said, okay, well, well, then you have to resign. And I said, well, that was what I tried to do on Thursday. I resign. And that was the end of it.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% behind you. We totally agree with each other, and they were just lying to me. And so I would go out and try and do something. And they would just like undercut every simple thing I tried to do. What I regret is the dishonesty of the leadership in failing to just say what was true, which is we changed our minds. We don't want to reform research anymore. So I spent months and months doing really simple things, like trying to move two direct reports who reported to me who didn't have the integrity to have the kind of responsibility they had. But I was being not only facing a bureaucratic system that opposed moving these positions. I'm not even talking about firing them, just moving them out of the critical position so other people could fill those roles and do them correctly. I face not only internal bureaucratic delays, but my bosses were undercutting me and stopped.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was brought in to reform the research group. People in the bank could tell that research was dysfunctional there. But shortly after I arrived, the number two, who I think had been behind this initiative, left to go take a position back in the finance minister in Indonesia and a different number two came into the bank. And in retrospect, what happened was that that number two decided we're not going to reform research. We don't want any noise. Because, you know, you reform things, you're going to get noise, you're going to get complaints. All other parts of the bank had been reformed research hadn't. But so I wasted, you know, like 16 months talking to the number two and the number one and saying, you understand if I'm really going to reform the research group, there's going to be noise and it's going to be a little contentious. You really want to do this, right? And yeah, no, no, absolutely. Full speed ahead. We're totally.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shouldn't try and be a research organization, and it should just be transparent about what it can be good at and is good at.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make bigger diplomatic decisions when they have to. So that, I think, is the value of the World Bank right now. The problem is that that kind of diplomatic function is inconsistent with the function of being a provider of scientific insight. The scientific endeavor has to be committed to truth no matter whose feathers get ruffled. There's certain kinds of convenient fictions that are required for diplomacy to work, you start accepting convenient fictions in science and science is just dead. So the banks got to decide, is it engaged in diplomacy or science? I think the diplomacy is its unique comparative advantage. So therefore, I think it's got to get out of the scientific business. It should just outsource its research.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting question. I think the bank is trying to serve two missions and it can't do both. One is a diplomatic function, which I think is very important. You know, the World Bank is a place where somebody who represents the government of China and somebody who represents the government of the United States sit at a conference room and argue, should we do A or B? And not just argue, but discuss, negotiate on a regular basis, they make decisions, and it isn't just China and U.S., it's a bunch of countries. I think it's very good for personal relationships, for the careers of people who will go on to have other positions in these governments, to have that kind of experience of basically diplomatic negotiation over a bunch of relatively small items because it's a confidence building measure that makes it possible for countries to”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That then become the dominant norms in this new place. But you also protect those norms by certain kinds of administrative structures, state functions that reinforce them. And I think if we don't pay attention to that and just keep doing what we've been doing in development assistance, I'm still fairly pessimistic about how many will make the kind of radical transformation that China made.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there's a there's a saying I picked up from Gordon Brown, which is that in establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest. I think some parts of this development process are just very slow. And so I think if you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that's gone into trying to build strong effective states to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think external investments in building states have yielded very little. And so we need to think about ways to transfer the functioning of existing states rather than just build them from scratch in existing places. So that's really a lot of the impetus behind this charter city's idea. Both you select people coming in who have a particular set of norms.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's possible, but you'd really want to look in detail and see which parts of the kind of the norms that are being conveyed there are beneficial and which parts are not. And then I think one also has to be thoughtful about the fact that you should ask, are the people who are being socialized into some new norms aware of what the transaction is and are they agreeing in some sense? Do they actually have some agency and some ability to choose yes I'm okay with this or no, maybe not and this is why I like the migration decision because it involves a more affirmative choice so if some missionaries set up a city and said here's how this city will work you're welcome to come and people could choose to go to that city or not and can choose to leave if they don't like it when they when they get there I'd be a lot a lot more comfortable with it.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's important for us to think about what are the mechanisms that we use to try and shape norms over time. Some of them are just kind of an invisible hand process where nobody's in charge. And norms often, I think, go in directions that are beneficial and appropriate. There's a great book you may know called The Civilizing Process that looked about just from the Middle Ages up to the present, looked at norms about just what it means to be polite or civilized, even just table manners. And it's really a fascinating account. So some of this happens automatically, but some of it happens because of activists and organizations and structures like churches. And we should be at least mindful of what are the ways in which those different bodies can push norms, what are the ways that are beneficial to everyone, like that increase efficiency, what are the ones that might”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The land that pay for the stuff you want to do. And then to answer your question, would I be worried if that's the way that China and the US compete with each other? Actually, no, I think that would be pretty good. The Chinese wouldn't set up those cities and run them exactly the way that somebody from the United States might prefer. But I think if people who want to migrate could choose between a Chinese location and a US location, that would put some pressure on both the US and China to organize these new opportunities in ways that really benefit the people who will go there.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this is one of these places where we have to be willing to just select from the feasible alternatives and not hold out for some ideal that we can't achieve. And I think it's worth sort of like being specific here. My hunch is that China will eventually realize that the way to pay for the infrastructure that it's building is part of this Belt and Road program is to do urban real estate development. The transport never pays for itself. It's always the real estate that goes up in value that you use to pay for all of this. So I think that the Belt and Road Project is inevitably going to turn to a kind of a version of new city, city scale real estate development to finance what they're trying to do. I think in parallel, the United States could be offering its own version of cities around the world that are new, that there's gains in the value.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to, they're the ones we need to, it's the citizens of those countries, potential countries, that we need to persuade this would be worth trying. And if they're willing to do it, then I think we can find locations where it could be done.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I think in retrospect, I should have done, and what I'll do now is go first to the countries which are willing to help set something up. Because a country like Honduras was not, the reason it was willing to do something radical like a new charter city was that it did not have the internal capacity to do something like a charter city. And what went wrong was that we couldn't get sufficient participation from outside of Honduras in setting this up. And then, frankly, in Honduras, there was a little bit of lack of transparency. They didn't really want outsiders either because it was kind of a small group that actually wanted to set these things up and control it internally. So I think the scarce kind of player, the short side of this market is going to be countries that are willing to say, we will help set up a new place that people can.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I thought in selling this idea, to do this, you'd need both some country that is willing to volunteer or supply the location for a new jurisdiction. And then some countries, country or more than one country, they can help establish the new jurisdiction. Like its legal systems and so forth, and administrative, all the systems you'd need. I thought the biggest constraint on this idea was that it would be hard to find countries that would be willing to say you could use our land to start something new. So I spent time in Madagascar, I spent time in Honduras. They were actually willing to try this.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As on dealing with the pandemic, which is that the alternatives are so terrible, the best option may be something that's kind of bad, but it's kind of expensive. We just do it anyway. The thing that I'm not sure we should call a charter city, but the thing I think we could do is create new cities that would solve the current impasse where you've got 750 million people who say they want to leave the countries where they currently live. And the existing countries that say we can't take, we don't want to take that many people. So I'm saying, okay, what's the middle ground here? What's the deal we could do? Let's create some new places that are still places that people want to go to, but where nobody in existing countries feels threatened by the creation of those new places. And let's try and offer that as a solution to what seems like this impasse.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I rename it. I don't know that in communicating the idea, I don't know that Charter City is the best name, but I think the idea is still a compelling alternative. And unfortunately, maybe this is now my shtick. It's kind of like 100 billion a year on testing. It's a kind of an unpleasant, bad idea that nobody likes, but it's just better than the alternatives. So the same thing.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real point here is just that whether you follow Glenn's model or my model, you're already up to 4 million tests a day, which is 10 times the capacity we've got. So let's not even argue about whether Glenn's right or I'm right. Let's just get a lot more tests because both of us think we need way more than we have.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, just before I leave the testing, another one of the things as economists and scientists, I think we really can usefully bring to these debates is just quantification. Just talk about the numbers. So this morning I was trying to think the best estimate, say, from New York State is that this infection fatality rate is about a half a percent. Half a percent of the people who catch an infection die. And if you look at, we have got about 2,000 people a day in the United States who are dying. So that means that about 400,000 people a day who are newly infected. Now, if each of those 400,000 people has, say, 10 contacts, which I think is modest, it could be more, that means that there's 4 million people a day that you've got to go out and find with your contact tracers. And, you know, I'm not sure we've got the capacity to do that.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Execute on now, or we know we're not going to have a kind of divisive fight and get stuck because we can't make a decision. The way to do that is just don't make the digital contact tracing part of the critical path. Just create a path where we get there whether or not that can work. And if it works, great. I'm not opposed to targeting the test if you've got a good way to do it. But don't make that a requirement for the path that protects us all.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Glenn and I are in agreement that the tests are very valuable. Glenn thinks that we can target the tests. I'm saying just test everybody on a regular basis. Glenn is saying you don't have to test everybody. What you can do is target your tests at people who are more likely to be infectious. And I agree that if you can target tests effectively, then you don't have to test as many people because really all you have to do is find enough positives and get them into isolation. But I think Glenn is assuming that the way we're going to predict safely, reliably who's infectious is through a digital apps that do digital contact tracing. And I'm skeptical that that's going to be ready in time and ready in the sense that everybody will be comfortable using it. So I'm saying if we want to have a plan that we know we can”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shelter in place rules and have no net effect on the reproduction number are because the tests depress it, more people in circulation raise it, you just set those numbers so that they balance each other out. And nine economically active people is worth a hell of a lot more than it costs to provide one test a day for a year.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could infect many more. We'd have to see if that's true. So you might have to have better ventilation or not have those big lecture halls. But we could surely restart university education, restart K-12. And these would be very important things to do because we know how valuable human capital is. We know how high the returns are to those kinds of investments. And I said before I was doing some calculations the last couple of days, the calculation I'm looking at is for each unit of testing capacity. And if we could test one more person each day, how many more jobs or how many more people could re-enter their return to their previous activities? And the model suggests that it's about nine. So like testing one person per day throughout the year would free up about nine people who could go back to doing what they were doing before, get out of the”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's one of my list of kind of plans to actually work out. So there's Major League Baseball, but then universities and then K-12 education, I think, are the next two. Part of the reality is that people are afraid of opening universities and K-12 education right now. If we had the tests, we can show everyone that if you test people frequently, isolate the few who are infectious as soon as you find out that they're infectious, you can actually let people start to interact again without raising this R number. So I think it's totally possible to reopen universities and reopen schools. Universities, you may make some adjustments beyond just test and isolate. It may be that a 300 person lecture hall, unless it's well ventilated, is just too risky because just even one person who's infectious.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, nobody kind of made a plan which says, look, if you're going to, there was an initial plan which is like put all the baseball players and like the big dome or something and isolate them. But obviously they don't want that. So they're going to be going home to their families. Some of them are going to get infected in their families. And so you need a plan for testing and retesting the baseball players if you want to make sure that one player doesn't infect another. So you need to do some calculations about, okay, how frequently do we need to test? And then also you alluded to this point before, which is how long, how do we have to respond when somebody tests positive? Like how long should they be isolated, both from other players, but also from the general public? But if we just put together the plan, I think we could safely restart baseball and do it with confidence, knowing that we're not going to increase the number of infections.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be great to get Major League Baseball started again. I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day and let them start playing games in empty stadiums because you need a lot more tests to test the fans to have them come in. But we could be playing baseball in empty stadiums without any risk that we're increasing this R factor. People enjoy baseball. It would be an important signal of how we go back to work in this regime. So I think that could be an important complement to nursing homes.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would try and do a calculation about where might tests be most valuable and if the states are the ones who are buying tests and providing them, encourage states to use them for those high valued purposes. I think frequent testing in nursing homes might be all it would take to cut the death rate in half right now. The estimates are there's many as half of the deaths are actually taking place in nursing homes. And it seems to me that there's no hope for contact tracing there. Let's talk about like rebuilding all of the nursing homes. I mean, that's not going to happen anytime soon. But if you tested everybody initially every day so you know exactly who's infectious inside a nursing home, test all of the staff, test all of the visitors, then we should be able to isolate the few who are infectious and really bring down the deaths in nursing homes. So I'd use those there first. Second,”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's what you have to do. If you're a restaurant, if your employees test negative, you can open. You have legal permission to open. And you have to require that people test negative. But if you do, that's fine. And if somebody who tests negative goes to restaurants and other people get infected because of that, the restaurant could actually have the protection of the mandate from the state that this is what you should do to protect public health. So I think the states could actually provide cover for firms to do and individuals to do what's best in terms of how to use this test information.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“has persuaded me that the FDA is far more important as a force that's slowing down progress there. There's been speculation about lawsuits, but there's really little indication that those will materialize. And the people I talk to who can't do things they want to do in testing are failing to do it because of the kind of concern about the FDA. So I don't think the fact support litigation is the big threat here. And also in terms of moving quickly, I think one of the things we could leverage, because this is a public good, is the sovereign immunity of the states. I think the states can actually just purchase the tests, say with money they get from the feds, and then even give instructions about here are ways to use these tests. This could even be regular.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that instead of litigating somebody who's harmed by taking a vaccine, because there's a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect, there's a separate compensation mechanism. I think there are many reasons to think that our judicial system is an ineffective way to address a harm or to provide insurance and that it slows down many important things that we need to do. But I'd be more in favor of a broader look at ways to improve the functioning of the judicial system rather than just do a, I mean, I don't have a strong view on this. It may be that to move quickly, we want to have a special patch related to what firms do with test information. But I don't think we should stop there. We really should be asking, how can we tune the judicial system?”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, this is where I'm defending science and economics as science. Here is really the science of medicine. We need to help everybody know here's what the facts are. Based on these kind of signals or this elapsed time, you can be confident that a person is not infectious any longer. And then people may still have some emotional aversive reactions, but I think if we can just provide credibly provide the facts, then that will start to change practice and practice will start to change some of those kind of deeper emotions.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I keep talking about recovery means I can actually go back to the dentist. Okay, so maybe my dentist will say, Paul, I don't want to be working in your mouth and you can't be wearing a mask when you're in the dental chair unless you get a recent, you have a recent test that shows that you're not positive, then fine. You can come on in and I can work on your teeth. So we might give other people the right and the ability to say There's certain things you can't do, certain services you can't have access to unless you can show that you got a negative. So restaurants might offer sit-down meals, but say you can only get a reservation. If you can show us, you've got a negative test result in the last, you know, a couple days. So we can use this information in ways that I think aren't very oppressive, aren't very risky that could let us go back to going to the dentist and having restaurant reels and do it without big risks, I think, to our freedoms”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can test you at home. So everybody finds out if they're infected or not, their attitude is that may be all you need to do. Because once people know they're infected, they'll take decisions to take actions to protect their colleagues, the people they know. Most people are responsible. Most people don't want to inflict harm on others. They may well just self-isolate. So maybe that with enough testing, we just let everybody know, are you infectious or not? And that's all we have to do. You could go to the other extreme and have some government system where the test system has to report every positive and the government forces quarantine on people. I don't think you need that. I don't think you get that much benefit out of that. And it's got a lot of, I think, potential costs. So let's get that information and then let's use it very gently, first just let people know and let them adjust. Second, maybe give someone like...”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, again, I was critical. It's been very funny to go from this angst, almost like crisis of the review I wrote of what economists have done, but then to shift into economist mode where I think we can actually provide some real benefit and some clarity in these conversations. So the way I frame this on testing is first, ask what would be the value of a particular piece of information. Let's just how valuable would it be if we know who's infected and who's not? Then, given that information separately, let's think about what's a good way to use that information. And I think there's some open questions about how best to use this. I have some colleagues who I've written a paper on because they were also promoting this idea of test everyone. Their view is that one of the ways we might do this is just at home get”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does worry me and I don't think that as well as they've done actually remember let's just pause for a second because this is a little tricky if r is equal to one that means that the number of deaths the number of infections will stay constant over time so you can have r equal to one at a low level of infection and low rate of deaths which is where Germany is we have r about equal to one at a higher rate of death but in any case it is worrisome because what we want for suppression is our significantly less than one and Germany is not testing at the scale that I would propose and I'm afraid that the way to get there is that even Germany is going to have to do more testing including more testing where you're just kind of fishing for people who are infected you just test people who are asymptomatic you've got no indication that they were in contact but you test”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often say this regulation is just getting the cost benefit trade off wrong. It's way too restrictive. There's little harm from tests that tests don't hurt people. It's not like a vaccine or a pharmaceutical agent. So the FDA is just needlessly slowing down innovation that could otherwise flourish. So pay some money and then get the FDA out of the way. And then all of these very clever researchers and university labs all across this country, they could give us all the tests we need.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To increase the supply of tests. And one part of that, as I've been saying, is we just have to pay for them. If we put up enough money, we can get tests. I've been saying if we spent about twice as much on tests as we spend on soda, we could have all the tests we need, like 23 million tests a day. So first, you got to provide money because tests are a public good. This has got to be money that comes from the government. It's hard to get there with having consumers pay. But the Congress has allocated $25 billion. There's a proposal now for another $75 billion from the Democratic plan. So we're getting there on the money. The other side, which frankly, I'm in this position, think about what I was saying before. I'm generally in the position of defending regulation. The more I've looked at the role of the FDA in holding back progress in testing, the more I've concluded this is a case where we have to say, as economists,”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've actually been working oddly. Mind you, I'm the theorist criticizing the use of models. So, you know, go figure, but what have I been doing recently? I've been using a model to try and figure out what is actually the value of additional test relative to its cost. So models definitely have their role, but you got to just stick to the idea that a fact beats a theory every time. I think it's just very clear that a test is worth a lot more than it would cost us to provide. Why aren't we delivering more? I think there's a general confusion and puzzlement about how to increase the supply of tests. And because people don't know how to go about increasing it, they say it's not possible. They treat it as if it's just something beyond our control. I think we have to look carefully at what changes should we make in policy.”
2020-05-20 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source