Last Updated: Oct 22nd, 2010 - 15:35:08 Newsletters : 2006 Newsletters : 31 March 2006 Thought for the Day It is a moot point whether good education produces wealth in a country or wealthy countries can afford good education. However, in the 1960s Finland had a mediocre education system but now Finnish 15 year olds have the highest levels of mathematical skills, scientific knowledge and reading literacy of any rich industrialised country. Perhaps we could learn something from Finland. Mar 29, 2006, 09:28 Newsletters : 2006 Newsletters : 31 March 2006 Post-Scarcity Prophet Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future. Interviewed by Ronald Bailey "One of the 25 most influential Americans," pronounced Time. "His ideas may just revolutionize the study of economics." Newsweek included him in its roster of "The Century Club," a "list of 100 people for the New Century." He is a perennial short-lister for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. His work has been lauded by business guru Peter Drucker and Nobel-winning economist Robert Solow. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. He was recently elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As one of the chief architects of "New Growth Theory," Paul Romer has had a massive and profound impact on modern economic thinking and policymaking. New Growth Theory shows that economic growth doesn’t arise just from adding more labor to more capital, but from new and better ideas expressed as technological progress. Along the way, it transforms economics from a "dismal science" that describes a world of scarcity and diminishing returns into a discipline that reveals a path toward constant improvement and unlimited potential. Ideas, in Romer’s formulation, really do have consequences. Big ones. Before New Growth Theory, economists recognized that technology contributed substantially to growth, but they couldn’t figure out how to incorporate that insight into economic theory. Romer’s innovation, expressed in technical articles with titles such as "Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth" and "Endogenous Technological Change," has been to find ways to describe rigorously and exactly how technological progress brings about economic growth. As Robert Solow told Wired in 1996, "Paul single-handedly turned [the study of economic growth] into a hot subject." The 46-year-old Romer, son of former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1983, six years after earning a B.S. in physics at the same school. Before joining Stanford’s faculty in 1996, he taught at a number of schools, including the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and the University of California at Berkeley. He and his wife, Virginia Langmuir, a medical doctor, live in Portola Valley, California, and have two children. In June, reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Romer poolside at his house, which overlooks a huge expanse of rolling ranchland owned by Stanford University. Read this interview here. Mar 30, 2006, 09:56 Newsletters : 2006 Newsletters : 31 March 2006 For Society To Thrive, The Rich Must Be Left Alone The essential point here is that the economic inequality that results from economic freedom is to the material self-interest of everyone. It is the foundation of rising real wages and a rising standard of living. Government intervention in the economic system is the use of force not against common criminals, who have previously initiated its use, but against peaceful citizens engaged in production and voluntary exchange and whose only "crime" is that they have done something the government has decided it does not like. This force serves to prevent people from doing what they judge to be in their interest to do and to compel them to do what they judge to be against their interest to do. In all cases of this kind, the government's force operates to make people worse off than they could have been. And the more extensive the government's intervention becomes, the greater becomes the gap between the life that people must live and the better life they could have lived had the government not stood in their way. At some point government intervention becomes sufficient to cause people to live not only worse than they might have lived, but worse than they actually did live in the past. We can learn a lot by looking at other countries and seeing how more, or less, government in peoples lives effects their well-being. Mar 14, 2006, 16:11