Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

World Service,27 Oct 2009,25 mins

Paul Romer

Global Business

Available for over a year

Peter Day encounters Paul Romer, senior fellow in the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and who twelve years ago the news magazine Time named as one of the 25 most influential people in the USA. Conventional economics is the so-called dismal science, dominated by the law of diminishing returns where businesses compete with each other into their ultimate extinction, but Paul Romer believes ideas turn economics into an optimistic science. Here he also about the need to build new cities to accommodate a growing world population in better conditions than we have managed up to now, developing new rules, laws and norms for urban life.

Programme Website
More episodes