Why Information Grows Quotes

“Schooling is certainly not a great proxy for knowhow and knowledge, since it is by definition a measure of the time spent in an establishment, not of the knowledge embodied in a person’s brain.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“A society built entirely out of rational individuals who come together on the basis of a social contract for the sake of the satisfaction of their wants cannot form a society that would be viable over any length of time. —FRANCIS FUKUYAMA”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Products augment us, and this is a great reason why we want them.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“In a physical system, information is the opposite of entropy, as it involves uncommon and highly correlated configurations that are difficult to arrive at.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“entropy is always lurking on the borders of information-rich anomalies,”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“We infuse messages with meaning automatically, fooling ourselves to believe that the meaning of a message is carried in the message. But it is not. This is only an illusion. Meaning is derived from context and prior knowledge. Meaning”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“The universe is made of energy, matter, and information, but information is what makes the universe interesting.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“The only connection between Chile and the history of electricity comes from the fact that the Atacama Desert is full of copper atoms, which, just like most Chileans, were utterly unaware of the electric dreams that powered the passion of Faraday and Tesla. As the inventions that made these atoms valuable were created, Chile retained the right to hold many of these atoms hostage. Now Chile can make a living out of them. This brings us back to the narrative of exploitation we described earlier. The idea of crystallized imagination should make it clear that Chile is the one exploiting the imagination of Faraday, Tesla, and others, since it was the inventors’ imagination that endowed copper atoms with economic value. But Chile is not the only country that exploits foreign creativity this way. Oil producers like Venezuela and Russia exploit the imagination of Henry Ford, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, Nicolas Carnot, James Watt, and James Joule by being involved in the commerce of a dark gelatinous goo that was virtually useless until combustion engines were invented.10”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“The allocation of the best jobs, just like that of the best apartments, tends to piggyback social networks.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Both personbytes and firmbytes show that our ability to accumulate large volumes of knowledge and knowhow is packaged in a nested structure in which what we consider to be a network at one scale becomes a node in the next. Networks of neurons become nodes when we abstract them as people, and networks of people become nodes when we abstract them as networks of firms. The bottom line is that accumulating large volumes of knowledge and knowhow is difficult because it requires evolving the networks that embody that knowledge and knowhow”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Extreme levels of inefficiency can only be supported by organizations whose revenue stream does not depend on their interactions with others, for if it did, they would have gone broke. Chief examples of these are organizations whose revenue comes from the collection of taxes, such as governments, or organizations that receive funds in a more or less unconditional way, such as the United Nations.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“interactions that should be simply market transactions—such as simple forms of service procurement—wind up subject to a regime of governance that makes them far more complicated than they need to be.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“To understand the physical origins of information we need to understand a few things first. One is the idea of a steady state. The second is the difference between a dynamic steady state and a static steady state.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“This world is different from the one in which our species evolved only in the way in which matter is arranged.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Life is a consequence of the ability of matter to compute.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Humans are special animals when it comes to information, because unlike other species, we have developed an enormous ability to encode large volumes of information outside our bodies.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“As the parts that made the Bugatti were pulled apart and twisted, the information that was embodied in the Bugatti was largely destroyed. This is another way of saying that the $2.5 million worth of value was stored not in the car’s atoms but in the way those atoms were arranged.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“In his 1995 book Trust, he argues that the ability of a society to form large networks is largely a reflection of that society’s level of trust. Fukuyama makes a strong distinction between what he calls “familial” societies, like those of southern Europe and Latin America, and “high-trust” societies, like those of Germany, the United States, and Japan. Familial societies are societies where people don’t trust strangers but do trust deeply the individuals in their own families (the Italian Mafia being a cartoon example of a familial society). In familial societies family networks are the dominant form of social organization where economic activity is embedded, and are therefore societies where businesses are more likely to be ventures among relatives. By contrast, in high-trust societies people don’t have a strong preference for trusting their kin and are more likely to develop firms that are professionally run.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“This figuring-out step is crucial, since overly optimistic economic models have often assumed that demand and incentives are enough to stimulate the production of any product. Incentives work to motivate intermediaries and traders, but makers, who are the ones that provide the substance of what is traded, need more than an incentive to make something. They need to know how to do it.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“characterizing social capital is not easy, not simply because of its collective nature but also because once we unpack the idea of social capital we find that it is not simply one thing. The idea of social capital includes bridging and bonding social capital, but also cultural values such as a society’s trust in strangers.”
― Cesar A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“. Contrary to conventional wisdom, simply having a general work force that is high school or even college educated represents no competitive advantage in modern international competition. To support competitive advantage a factor must be highly specialized to an industry’s particular needs—a scientific institute specialized in optics, a pool of venture capital to fund software companies. . . . Competitive advantage results from the presence of world-class institutions that first create specialized factors and then continually work to upgrade them.”
― Cesar A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“the mix of products a country exports are highly predictive of its future level of income, indicating that the knowhow that is embodied in a society helps pin down its level of prosperity.”
― Cesar A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“How are social networks formed? The basics of social network formation is based on three simple ideas: shared social foci, triadic closure, and homophily. The first two ideas help us understand where we get our friends. A shared social foci means simply that links are more likely to form among people who share a social focus (i.e., classmates, workmates, people who attend the same church, etc.), whereas triadic closure means that links are more likely to form among people who share friends. Homophily, on the other hand, attempts to explain the links that stick—it is the idea that links are more likely to form among people who have similar interests and characteristics.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Granovetter’s findings, which applied to white-collar workers, showed that personal contacts were the main way these workers found jobs. But by comparing his data with other sources, he also found that this was not different from the way in which blue-collar workers found jobs. With a few exceptions, subsequent studies in and outside the United States have confirmed that personal contacts are crucial for people to find job opportunities. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which followed five thousand American families in which the household heads and their spouses were under age forty-five, found in 1978 that 52 percent of white men, 47.1 percent of white women, 58.5 percent of black men, and 43 percent of black women found their current job through friends and relatives. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s 1989 Study of Disadvantaged Youths found that 51 percent of whites and 42 percent of African Americans in three poor neighborhoods of Boston found jobs through personal contacts.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“A landmark study was Granovetter’s PhD thesis, which was built on an unprecedented survey of the job searching behavior of professional, technical, and managerial workers in the Boston suburb of Newton. Granovetter observed that preexisting social networks, rather than market forces, were the primary means by which people found jobs. Almost 56 percent of his sample, he noted, had found their latest job through personal contacts, which he defined as contacts established not with the purpose of finding a job, and that involved mostly friends and family.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“We can think of knowledge and knowhow as continuous, but since the networks that hold them are not continuous, knowledge and knowhow must be quantized, and not just in theory but also in practice. So the quantization of knowledge and knowhow, which is brought about in part by the cost of links, helps us answer the question of why it is difficult to accumulate increasing volumes of knowledge and knowhow. The answer is that accumulating knowledge and knowhow is difficult because creating the networks required to embody both knowledge and knowhow is difficult.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“A recent survey of private US health care facilities estimated that the support staff of hospital physicians spends nineteen hours a week interacting with insurance providers in prior authorizations, while clerical staff spend thirty-six hours a week filing claims. The cost of interactions between private health care providers and private insurance providers was estimated to be $68,000 per physician per year, totaling a whopping $31 billion per year—equivalent to the GDP of the Dominican Republic in 2005.22 The interaction costs in 1999 for the entire health care system, including private and public, were estimated on the low end to be $31 billion and on the high end to be $294 billion—which is comparable to the present day GDP of Singapore or Chile.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“as cities began to trade with one another and governments began to impose their rule over larger areas, the use of standards grew. The coevolution of standards and markets is easy to understand, since anyone buying a bushel of corn from a vendor in another town would want that bushel to mean the same in both towns. So the possibility of trade created an incentive for standardization, and helped the expansion of the governments that were keen on the use of standards.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies