Cesar A. Hidalgo > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“As the twentieth century continued to roar, the idea of information grew in status to an idea of global importance. Yet as the idea of information became more popular, we slowly began to forget about the physicality of information that had troubled Boltzmann. The word information became a synonym for the ethereal, the unphysical, the digital, the weightless, the immaterial. But information is physical. It is as physical as Boltzmann’s atoms or the energy they carry in their motion. Information is not tangible; it is not a solid or a fluid. It does not have its own particle either, but it is as physical as movement and temperature, which also do not have particles of their own.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Knowhow is the tacit computational capacity that allows us to perform actions, and it is accumulated at both the individual and collective levels. The tacit nature of knowhow seems strange, as it makes us feel like automatons that are unaware of what we are doing. Yet there is nothing strange in that. As Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, once said: “No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”4”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“the irreversibility of time and the origins of information are properties of the universe that hinge on additional physical laws governing the behavior of large collections of particles. This is a wild theoretical territory, where the basic idea of a trajectory—the path along which something travels—loses its meaning. Surprisingly, when trajectories become meaningless is when time emerges.”
― 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

“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 A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“To explain the origins of physical order, Ludwig connected phenomena occurring at different spatial scales, mainly atoms and gases.1 Although it makes sense today, in Ludwig’s time working across spatial scales was a practice that violated an implicit contract among scientists. Many of Ludwig’s colleagues saw science as a hierarchy of Russian nesting dolls, with new structures emerging at each level. In this hierarchy, transgressing boundaries was thought unnecessary. Economics did not need psychology, just as psychology did not need biology. Biology did not need chemistry, and chemistry did not need physics. Explaining gases in terms of atoms, although not as preposterous as explaining human behavior in terms of biology, was seen as a betrayal of this implicit deal.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“The correlations that characterize the information we transmit through human forms of communication (such as English) or biological forms of communications (such as DNA) are there whether we know how to decode them or not. They are a characteristic of information-rich states, not of who is observing them. 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 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

“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

“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

“Encoding and decoding messages was a mathematical problem that was too interesting to be abandoned as the war dwindled. Mathematicians continued to formalize the idea of information, but they framed their efforts in the context of communication technologies, transcending the efforts to decipher intercepted messages. The mathematicians who triumphed became known as the world’s first information theorists or cyberneticists. These pioneers included Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener.”
― César A. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“In our universe, there is no past, and no future, but only a present that is being calculated at every instant.”
― 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

“Standards are prevalent in our modern world because they reduce the costs of interactions among the firms and people that subscribe to them.”
― César 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. It is hard for us humans to separate information from meaning because we cannot help interpreting messages.”
― 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