Paul Romer

Sam Altman leads with the lie. 1.

Between Wednesday’s euphoric market reaction to the administration’s narrowed focus on a trade war with only China and the Friday’s quiet surrender exempting Chinese-made computers and smartphones from the President’s reciprocal [sic] tariffs, there was a…

There was a sad moment last week during the collapse of Frontier Math.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to get to know Apollo Robbins.

To protect a hard-earned reputation for objectivity, Nobel laureates in economics usually refrain from making public policy recommendations on the basis of personal values or political beliefs.

In a previous post, I wrote that Anaconda got in my way when I was trying to learn Python.

If you teach a course that requires Python, you’ve encountered students on macOS who are trapped by Anaconda.

For the second year in a row, we’ve been through an entirely unnecessary spring quarter’s worth of hand-wringing about whether progress toward lower inflation has faltered.

The URLsafe representation of my public key is given by the 44 characters in the box, including the equal sign at the end. ╔════════════════ PUBLIC KEY ════════════════╗ ║F4qzRqQSe6FRCdhxBcMCdhYnDg8fwz4WijxHGCnXCvY=║ ╚═════════════════════════════════════…

The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter seems to be morphing into Ashley Maddison ||\times|| Weekend at Bernie’s, with a Hotel California subtext.

I made a point in an interview today on Bloomberg that is worth emphasizing.

In my interview on Bloomberg (also picked up here) I responded to a question about what the Fed should do by saying “It would be crazy to raise rates.”

Flying with a Plan To descend from 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet, a disciplined pilot follows a plan that allows for stabilizing changes in the timing: Cut the power by enough to establish a rate of descent of about 1000 feet per minute.

Here’s the latest update in a series of posts about seasonal adjustment and progress toward lower inflation.

I wonder if Kevin McCarthy understands that when you pull this kind of stunt, things can go wrong in ways you don’t anticipate.

You may have seen this headline about today’s inflation numbers, or something like it: Unfortunately, it gets things backwards.

If you thought that I was being too cynical when I said in my previous post that the decision makers at Silicon Valley Bank were not “well-intentioned naïfs,” Daniel Gilbert, Todd C.

If you were a pilot, how would you feel about being told that the copilot who will be flying with you is fun to talk to but sometimes lies convincingly?

According to his webpage on the First Republic Bank website, James H.

After feeding the hype about the terrifying power of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, now confronts the downside of unrealistic expectations.

The lesson from the 1980s that everyone seems to have forgotten (or never wanted to admit), is that bank losses due to interest rate risk merely set the stage.

One week ago, I wrote that my point estimate of the decrease in inflation during the last quarter of 2022 was 300 basis points, with a subjective uncertainty interval of (-100, 400).

TL;DR Using the not seasonally adjusted CPI-U less food and energy, the average rate of increase for the months of October, November, December and January, was 6.5% in 2021–2.

In my post on the CPI numbers from one month ago, I argued that the data on inflation was better than most news reports suggested.

If you are worried that the decision today by the Fed to increase rates by only 50 basis points is a sign that it is giving up on the fight against inflation too soon, you may not realize how good was the news that we received yesterday about the current…

One of the side-stories in the FTX saga is the fawning portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) that Sequoia Capital published less than 2 months before the collapse of his financial empire.

I learned everything I needed to know to understand the crypto-crisis and the great financial crisis from the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s.

Inflation in the US Looks Similar A simple point emerges from this summary of the experience with inflation in the leading European countries and the Anglo-offshoots: Across countries, the timing of the recent increase in inflation is very similar.

John Cochrane used a theory about Lisa Cook to dismiss her as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Someone who tweets under the handle @enn_nafnlaus cautioned that it is easy to make a mistake when comparing trajectories with different exponential growth rates.

What follows is a timeline of events leading up to the World Bank’s decision to stop publishing the Doing Business report because of manipulation of the data used in the 2018 and 2020 reports.

When I was asked back in June of 2021 about lessons for science from the pandemic, the gist of what I said was: In a democracy, the community of science can be a uniquely valuable source of objective facts, but assertions by scientists will be trusted only

Two opposing interpretations of the evidence about waning vaccine protection are grounded in two very different models of the course of a Covid-19 infection.

Suppose that a drug company is trying to get approval for a new pain medication that might have some serious negative side effects.

A recent study of vaccine effectiveness using data from the Mayo Clinic shows why it is sometimes better to base policy decisions on a change in a proxy indicator rather than to wait until effects are visible as a change in a direct measure of the variable

There are two false dichotomies that are easy to steer clear of in the debate about third doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

There are two mathematically equivalent ways to describe the protection that a vaccine offers against such specific outcomes as severe disease: relative risk effectiveness Specialists understand the quirks of these two measures, but the rest of us may not…

I have a new post that is available on its own subdomain: https://adtax.paulromer.net It offers a specific suggestion about a policy that the citizens of the US take change and protect their social and political discourse from the rapidly growing, uncheck…

As reported in today’s New York Times, in response to a request by an intermediary, I made a last ditch attempt to explain the value of testing to WH advisor Scott Atlas in an email I sent on Sept. 21.

What It Takes To Be a Leader in Both Basic Science and Technological Progress Paul Romer New York University Statement for House Budget Committee Hearing on Federal R&D Wednesday July 8, 2020 Contents The Weakness Revealed By the Pandemic Science, Technol…

A lightly edited version of this twitter thread: In a week dominated by horrible news, there are signs that the Senate may make the right choice when it passes a new response to the pandemic this July:

The number of virus tests that the US uses to fight the ongoing pandemic will be very sensitive to the cost of a test.

Answers to questions the [proposal to use virus tests to reopen schools safely](https://schools.paulromer.net)

According to the policy guidance on reopening schools from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP): “The AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in sc…

It might be time to review the massive damage that the FDA is doing by restricting the supply and use of tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Labor market: In May 2019, about 5.9 million people were unemployed in a labor force of 163 million.

(Data updates, May 1) In this post, I list a number of specific applications where tests could save lives and restore confidence.

Imagine a world in which the only way to get a soda is to get your doctor to write a prescription.

America is confronting two crises: an economic crisis laying waste to our livelihoods and a health crisis threatening our lives.

How much difference does it make if the test used to send people into quarantine is bad?