In this episode, Paul talks with Paul Romer, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. They discussed Romer's path as an academic turned entrepreneur, who returned to Stanford to explore how the startup dynamic could potentially be applied at the level of developing countries.

Romer's contributions to the field of economics include being the primary developer of New Growth Theory, which reduces the traditional emphasis on the scarcity of objects and directs attention to the power of new ideas. His theory has brought renewed optimism about the potential for growth in both advanced and developing economies.

For his work on the economics of ideas, Romer was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by TIME magazine (1997), elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) and awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics (2002). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Prior to his current Stanford University position, he taught in the university’s Graduate School of Business as the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics and was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award (1999). Before moving to Stanford, Romer taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

In addition to his career in teaching and research, Romer founded Aplia, Inc., which is now part of Cengage Learning. Aplia, which develops and applies technologies to improve student learning, grew out of his conviction that it is possible to use information technology to raise productivity in education. This lesson has important implications for how societies keep up with the growing demand for highly educated workers—a demand that is driven by the use of new technology in all other sectors of the economy.

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Kling is an independent scholar who writes about a wide variety of economic issues. He was an economist on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1980-1986, and served as a senior economist at Freddie Mac from 1986-1994. In 1994, he founded Homefair.com, one of the first commercial sites on the World Wide Web. Kling is the author of several books, most recently From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and The Lasting Triumph over Scarcity and Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, published by the Cato Institute.  Kling received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

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