Why Information Grows

Why do some nations prosper while others do not? While economists often turn to measures like GDP or per-capita income to answer this question, interdisciplinary theorist Cesar Hidalgo argues that there is a better way to understand economic success. Instead of measuring the money a country makes, he proposes, we can learn more from measuring a country's ability to make complex products--in other words, the ability to turn an idea into an artifact and imagination into capital. In Why Information Grows, Hidalgo combines the seemingly disparate fields of economic development and physics to present this new rubric for economic growth. He argues that viewing development solely in terms of money and politics is too simplistic to provide a true understanding of national wealth. Rather, we should be investigating what makes some countries more capable than others. Complex products--from films to robots, apps to automobiles--are a physical distillation of an economy's knowledge, a measurable embodiment of the education, infrastructure, and capability of an economy. Economic wealth is about applying this knowledge to turn ideas into tangible products, and the more complex these products, the more economic growth a country will experience. Just look at the East Asian countries, he argues, whose rapid rise can be attributed to their ability to manufacture products at all levels of complexity. A radical new interpretation of global economics, Why Information Grows overturns traditional assumptions about wealth and development. In a world where knowledge is quite literally power, Hidalgo shows how we can create societies that are limited by nothing more than their imagination.