Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. By César Hidalgo. Basic Books; 232 pages; $26.99. Allen Lane; £20.
THE question seems basic, but economists have yet to find a comprehensive answer: why and how do economies grow? Additional capital and labour were long considered the main factors. Then the focus shifted to higher productivity and increased human capital, the knowledge embodied in members of society.
César Hidalgo tackles the question in another way. Economies grow, he says, because the information contained in them grows—not just in people’s heads, but also in the social networks that connect everyone and even in the objects that populate the world. What is more, this ever-expanding pool of information did not start with humans, but dates back to the beginning of time. “[W]e are born from it, and it is born from us,” he writes gnostically.
As such sweeping phrases make clear, adding to economic-growth theory is not the only goal motivating Mr Hidalgo, a statistical physicist who teaches at MIT’s Media Lab and is a pioneer in visualisation tools, which extract...
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