主题：Policy Lessons from the Economics of Ideas
演讲人：Paul Romer 斯坦福大学商学院经济学教授
时间：11月19日2：00－4：00PM
地点：成人直播
老楼202室
Paul Romer简历：
Paul Romer是斯坦福大学商学院经济学教授，斯坦福大学国际发展中心（SCID）、经济政策研究所（SIEPR）和胡佛研究所（HooverInstitution）的资深研究员。Romer教授在80年代和90年代对新增长理论做出了奠基性的贡献，成为当今美国最有影响的经济学家之一，也是近年来诺贝尔经济学奖的最热门人选之一。1997年被美国《时代》杂志评为美国最有影响力的25个人之一。
2002年因在新增长理论领域的杰出成就和贡献荣获Horst Claus Recktenwald经济学奖，同年还当选为美国艺术与科学院院士。此外，Romer教授还是美国计量经济学会的资深会员，美国国家经济研究局（NBER）的研究员。执教斯坦福大学商学院之前，曾在加利福尼亚大学伯克莱分校、芝加哥大学和罗彻斯特大学担任经济学教授。
此讲座为英文演讲，欢迎同学踊跃参加！
附演讲内容简介：
Economics was once the study of scarce objects. It's conclusions, as exemplified in the writings of Thomas Malthus, were grim. Now, economists are developing an economics of ideas. Among all possible ideas, the two most important types are technologies and rules. The conclusions that emerge from the economic analysis of ideas are more optimistic. They can profoundly change our understanding of history and our vision of the future.
Malthus assumed that people don't discover new ideas. He concluded that when the number of people increases, each person has fewer objects, which leads to a lower standard of living. Ideas differ from objects because we can share them. In the world in which we actually live, one in which people can discover and share new ideas, it is better for each of us to be near to and interact with as many other people as possible. The economics of ideas can therefore explain three of the most important trends in recent history: globalization, urbanization, and growth rates that are increasing over time.
As more people interact, the rules that structure our interactions become more important and more complex. For this reason, the economics of ideas is now being extended from a narrow study of technological ideas about inanimate objects to a broader study that includes rules as a complementary class of ideas.
Historians have long understood that improvements in technologies and rules are the two drivers of human progress. Nevertheless, until the 1980s, economists had little to say about how either technologies or rules changed. They treated technological change as being "exogenous." They viewed a good system of rules as a static universal rather than a dynamic system that evolves as other parts of the economy progress. They assumed that leaders could somehow impose good rules, without explaining how actual rules changed throughout history and why rules have varied so dramatically across societies.
In the 1980s, endogenous growth theory showed that we could study the discovery and implementation of new technologies. It showed that the rules a society adopts can speed up or slow down the rate of technological change. It also showed that good rules for discovering and implementing new technologies differ in important ways from good rules for allocating scarce objects. Although strong property rights on objects are generally beneficial, strong property rights on ideas can b
