Source, in full
Discussing rapidly-increasing education levels and competition from countries outside of the United States in a 2004 venture capital meeting in California, as quoted in "A Terrible Thing to Waste." The New York Times Magazine. July 31, 2009.
Notes from Wikiquote
About the quote: Even though Romer made this statement approximately four years before the 2008 Financial Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession, policy makers repeated the idea frequently during the Crisis and the Recession as a reminder that necessary economic and financial reforms which were previously politically impossible were now quite feasible. (See, for example, "A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste," Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 21, 2010).