His proposals all focus on idea generation and reducing the barriers for such ideas to flow across people. The "privatization" of knowledge slows down economic growth because certain permutations of these ideas are not discovered and acted upon as quickly in these closed-loop systems. For those who know some mathematics, read Erzo Luttmer's papers to see how ideas and learning stimulate firm level economic growth and thus macro-growth. My old friend Dr. Luttmer is the leader in developing the new generation of economic growth models.
Dr. Romer's core ideas;
1. He supports government investment in scientific infrastructure for accelerating "building on the work of others". Python is an example of such open source technology. I was a pinch surprised here that he didn't endorse a larger budget for NSF and NIH.
2. Transparency --- Paul argues that the private sector needs incentives to innovate but when such innovations occur that such firms must reveal enough details about their breakthroughs to allow other "outsiders" to build on these insights. The Devil will be in the Details here. Romer argues that learning will occur more quickly under these rules. Will such required "revelations" slow down the initial research?
Paul is also concerned about data monopolies. Firms such as Uber sit on a treasure trove of data. If you are interested in transport questions in cities, their data is much better than the Department of Transportation's National Household Transportation Surveys but Uber's research incentives are solely focused on making $ for that company. This means that their data will be under-utilized and the research will focus on topics that boost Uber's profits. From the perspective of learning about transportation in cities (and the sharing economy's labor market) , this is a shame and this has economic growth consequences (I admit that this last link is a pinch murky).
3. Romer wants to preserve the firewalls between government agencies and politics. The Federal Reserve has been able to do its job because the Fed Chief is independent of politics. If the EPA and other agencies also enjoy such "independence" then the rules of the game will be such that high quality individuals will choose to work for government and higher quality government will help us to achieve higher economic growth. Again, I agree with this point, but it will difficult to quantify.
Permit me to build on #2;
Suppose that for a representative set of Americans that IRS (Chetty data), Amazon, Bank of America, E-Trade, Equifax, Google, Facebook, Zillow, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter created an integrated daily data based with anonymous identifiers detailing all daily activity.
Such a data set would facilitate research on numerous fronts. Research on climate change adaptation would be greatly aided as the researchers would merge in temperature, pollution and natural disaster risk and actually test how different people respond to exogenous events.
Would we need national income accounts if we had such merged micro-data? In real time, for many people we could track the evolution of key state variables related to credit, health, well being.