César A. Hidalgo > 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

“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

“Technologies that change society are technologies that change interactions between people”
― César A. Hidalgo

“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

“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

“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

“The economy of early hominids and that of twenty-first century society have enormous differences, but they do share one important feature: in both of these economies, humans accumulate information in objects. Our world is different from that of early hominids only in the way in which atoms are arranged.”
― César Hidalgo

“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

“In the U.S. there are two types of hipsters: those who know how to program and those who serve coffee.”
― César Hidalgo

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

“His nemesis, the physicist turned philosopher Ernst Mach, maintained that science should focus only on relationships among directly observable quantities.”
― César 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

“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

“Humans, and some machines, have the ability to interpret messages and infuse them with meaning. But what travels through the wires or electromagnetic waves is not that meaning. It is simpler. It is just information.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“This tells us that when it comes to communication, the meaningful rides on the meaningless. Our ability to transmit meaningful messages builds on the prior existence of meaningless forms of physical order. These meaningless forms of order are what information truly is.”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Emphasizing the ability of products to augment human capacity can help us refine what we understand as the economy. It helps us see the economy not as the careful management of resources, the wealth of a nation, or a network of financial transactions, but as a system that amplifies the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow through the physical embodiment of information and the context-specific properties that this knowledge helps carry. This is an interpretation of the economy as a knowledge and knowhow amplifier, or a knowledge and knowhow amplification engine: a complex sociotechnical system able to produce physical packages containing the information needed to augment the humans who participate in it. Ultimately, the economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”
― César 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