Let me get this straight. Paul Romer became a lawyer and ever since, he has done whatever he can to make sure he can continue to practice law, in his case by becoming an economist. He gets quoted in a [possibly] policy-making book by the author David Warsh. And Paul Romer tells people not to become lawyers.

This is a pretty clever of Mr. Romer. He serves his own economic interests by convincing potential competitors not to become lawyers.

As a scientist in training (PhD, biochemistry), I'd like to know what Warsh and Romer would do with all these scientists and engineers? The current system trains ~40,000 post-docs a year for ~400 new academic research faculty positions. Sure, universities are not the only places to do research, but there are not 39,600 jobs at pharmaceutical companies, either. Highly trained (PhDs) scientists are jumping ship to other fields (including law and business) because our current research environment just doesn't have enough space. If we want to create knowledge we need to create places to do research, not more researchers.

I took my dose of the dismal science at Kansas, back just after the glaciers retreated (you can see the shape of the valleys just south of town), when Jim Quirk was trying to use linear algebra, before the days of Fortran programming, to predict economic utility in plus or minus arrays. His patience exceeded my barriers of frustration.

After an equally frustrating dose of reality in the Kansas City financial world, I have found a comfortable life, at the far edge of the softest time and place in the history of the planet to be a middle-class, middle-aged white guy, making a living by enforcing differentials in the rule of law in the Arkansas Ozarks.

One of the most useful, and frustrating, experiences of living in Paradise has been to try to teach history to a bunch of post-pubescent Ozarks high school graduates, who could not be convinced that 20 years is a lifetime, or that anything useful had happened before they were born.

The knowledge economists are guilty of the same type of short-sightedness. Given a decent time-lag after Sir Isaac Newton, outside of the shaman profession, knowledge has only been a commodity with utility for the last couple of centuries, less than four of my lifetimes, less than an eye-blink in the history of our post Ice Age ancestors, let alone the planet.

It does not matter how much information we have to exchange if we let the need of our DNA to replicate carry us beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We are currently laying the foundation of the greatest human die-off in recent history in the wombs of our loving mothers.

Malthus was not wrong; he was just premature, and he looked at food instead of water. Knowledge is no comfort to the thirsty.

I certainly understand the ways in which information is a nonrival good, but in many situations this doesnt seem to tranlate in a practical sense. While once an idea is put out there, it might not be an extinguishable resource like trees are, but how is that idea to be communicated. Books, the internet? These ARE to some degree scarce goods and will come with a cost. Even word of mouth, and travel, come with costs that seem to limit who has access to, and can use knowledge.