Post-Scarcity Prophet

Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future.

Ronald Bailey from the December 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

With ideas, you can't get one price to do both things. Let me give an extreme example. Oral rehydration therapy is one of those few ideas which did actually jump immediately from science to consumer benefit. It's a simple scientific insight about how you can save the life of a child who's suffering from diarrhea. Literally millions of lives have been saved with it. So what price should you charge people for using it?

Because everybody can use the idea at the same time, there's no tragedy of the commons in the intellectual sphere. There's no problem of overuse or overgrazing or overfishing an idea. If you give an idea away for free, you don't get any of the problems when you try and give objects away for free. So the efficient thing for society is to offer really big rewards for some scientist who discovers an oral rehydration therapy. But then as soon as we discover it, we give the idea away for free to everybody throughout the world and explain "Just use this little mixture of basically sugar and salt, put it in water, and feed that to a kid who's got diarrhea because if you give them pure water you'll kill them." So with ideas, you have this tension: You want high prices to motivate discovery, but you want low prices to achieve efficient widespread use. You can't with a single price achieve both, so if you push things into the market, you try to compromise between those two, and it's often an unhappy compromise.

The government doesn't pay drug companies prizes for coming up with AIDS drugs. It says they've got to incur these huge expenses, but then if they succeed, they can charge a high price for selling that drug. This has generated a lot of progress and we're prolonging the life of people with AIDS, but the high price is also denying many people access to those drugs.

reason: Over the broad sweep of human history, technological progress and economic growth were painfully slow. Why has it sped up now?

Romer: It's so striking. Evolution has not made us any smarter in the last 100,000 years. Why for almost all of that time is there nothing going on, and then in the last 200 years things suddenly just go nuts?

One answer is that the more people you're around, the better off you're going to be. This again traces back to the fundamental difference I described before. If everything were just objects, like trees, then more people means there's less wood per person. But if somebody discovers an idea, everybody gets to use it, so the more people you have who are potentially looking for ideas, the better off we're all going to be. And each time we made a little improvement in technology, we could support a slightly larger population, and that led to more people who could go out and discover some new technology.

Another answer is that we developed better institutions. Neither the institutions of the market nor the institutions of science existed even as late as the Middle Ages. Instead we had the feudal system, where peasants couldn't decide where to work and the lord couldn't sell his land. On the science side, we had alchemy. What did you do if you discovered anything? You kept it secret. The last thing you'd do was tell anybody.

reason: How did the better institutions come about?

Romer: That's one of the deep questions. There's some kind of political process, some group decision process, which leads to institutions. If you go back to what I said a minute ago about the advantages of having many people, you can see that there's a tension here. There are huge benefits to having more people and having us all interact amongst ourselves to create goods and to share ideas. But you face a really big challenge in trying to coordinate all of those decisions, because if you have large numbers of independent decision makers who aren't coordinating their actions appropriately, you could get chaos. Think about millions of drivers with no rules of the road, no agreement about whether you drive on the left or the right.

So where do these institutions come from? It was a process of discovery, just as people discovered how to make bronze. They also discovered ways to organize political life. We can use democratic choice as an alternative to, say, a hereditary system of selecting who's the king. What's subtle here is, How do those discoveries get into action? It's not like a profit motive in a firm that brings software to market. There was a process of persuasion when somebody discovered that, hey, this would be a better way for us to organize ourselves. So we had political and economic thinkers -- Locke, Hobbes, Smith -- who managed to persuade some of their peers to adopt those institutions.

So institutions came from a combination of discovery, persuasion, adoption -- and then copying. When good institutions work somewhere in the world, other places can copy them.

reason: Many economic historians are critical of New Growth Theory. Economic growth is a modern phenomenon, yet it appears that New Growth Theory should apply equally to the Roman Empire or Ming China as well as the modern world.

Romer: I think that's a caricature of the theory. New Growth Theory describes what's possible for us but says very explicitly that if you don't have the right institutions in place, it won't happen. If anything, it was the old style of theory which made it sound like technological change falls from the sky like manna from heaven, regardless of how we structure our institutions. This new theory says technological change comes about if you have the right institutions, which we have had.

reason: So what's the crucial difference between Ming China and modern economies today?

Romer: Ming China was very advanced. It had steel. It had clocks. It had movable type. Yet it was far from generating either the modern institutions of science or the institutions of the market.

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O Nobel da Economia « O Insurgente links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…Economia, Teoria — Miguel @ 09:50 Greg Makiw apresenta a relação dos favoritos para ganhar o Nobel da Economia segunda a agên cia de apostas Landbrokes. Os 3 primeiros classificdos são Eugene Fama, Paul Romer e Ernst Fehr. Deixe um comentário No Comments Yet » Ainda sem comentários. Feed RSS para comentários a este post. TrackBack URI Publicar um comentário Clique aqui para cancelar a resposta. nome…