Crystals of Information and Crystals of Imagination, Page 77-79:
Thanks to our ability to crystallize information, our standard of living continues to rise. Our ability to crystallize imagination is what endows us with the capacity to read at night, refrigerate our fresh fruits and vegetables, search among trillions of online documents, and travel around the world in less than a day. Yet our ability to create the complex products that endow us with these fantastic capacities is spread unevenly across the globe. Our world is populated by a myriad of products that only a few countries and regions know how to make. Our ability to crystallize imagination is geographically speckled, but why? Why is our ability to create refridgerators, jet engines, and memory devices concentrated in a few parts of the world? Why do many countries know how to make and export shoes but only a few know how to make and export helicopters?What underlies these contrasts? The simple answer to this question is that developing the ability to create each crystal of imagination is difficult, and before countries can enter a market, they need to figure out how to make the goods that are transacted in that market.
this figuring-out step is crucial, since overly optimistic economic models have often assumed that demand and incentives 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 incentives to make something. They need to know how to do it.
The truth is that making products in the real world is difficult because it requires knowhow and knowledge. So to understand why our ability to crystallize imaginationis spread unevenly across the globe, we need to understand why it is difficult to accumulate the knowledge and knowhow required to create complex products.
As we discussed previously, complex products embody and amplify the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow. Hence, the people making these products need to have access to the knowledge and knowhow to make them in their "raw" form—that is, the knowledge and knowhow embodied in human flesh, not the knowledge and knowhow embodied implicitly in items. In academic circles this humanly embodied knowledge is referred to as "tacit" knowledge when it involves knowhow that cannot be explicitly described. As the Hungarian Polymath Michael Polanyi cleverly noted, often "we know more than we can tell."
The separation between practical uses of knowledge and knowhow and the knowledge and knowhow embodied in people implies that making products will be more difficult in places where obtaining access to people with specific forms of knowledge and knowhow is difficult. If knowledge and knowhow were easy to accumulate, people could easily acquire whatever knowhow they needed to make the crystals of imagination they don't yet know how to make.in that world, it would be relatively easy for any group of people to start making any product, and therefore differences in the ability of countries to make products should be small or non-existent. Yet in a world where knowledge and knowhow are trapped in social networks and are difficult to copy, we should expect large differences in countries' ability to crystallize imagination, since differences in the knowledge and knowhow available in a given country should be reflected in the set of products that each country is able to produce.
Social Learning in Networks and Personbytes, Page 81-83:
The social and experiental aspects of learning imply that there is a limit to the amount of knowledge and knowhow an individual can accumulate. That limit makes the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow at the collective level even more difficult, because such an accumulation requires that we break up knowledge and knowhow into chunks that are smaller than the ones an individual can hold.
Chopping up knowhow compounds the difficulties involved in individuals' accumulation of knowhow not only because it multiples the problem of accumulating knowledge and knowhow by the number of individuals involved but also because it introduces the combinatorial problem of connecting individuals in a structure that can reconstitute the knowledge and knowhow that were chopped up in the first place. That structure is a network. Our collective ability to accumulate knowledge is therefore limited by both the finite capacity of individuals, which forces us to chop up large volumes of knowledge and knowhow, and the problem of connecting individuals in a network that can put this knowledge and knowhow back together.
We can simplify this discussion by defining the maximum amount of knowledge and knowhow that a human nervous system can accumulate as a fundamental unit of measurement. We call this unit a personbyte, and define it as a maximum knowledge and knowhow carrying capacity of a human.Personbytes are fundamental in the sense that the accumulation of a volume of knowledge and knowhow that is smaller than a personbyte is constrained only by individual limitations (including experience and social learning), whereas the accumulation of an amount of knowledge and knowhow that is larger than a personbyte is also limited by collective limitations (including chunking up and distributing that knowledge and knowhow). If we say that an individual can hold up to one personbyte of knowledge and knowhow, then all products that require more than one personbyte of knowledge and knowhow will require teams of individuals. Furthermore, creating a team capable of making a complex product requires accumulating the knowledge and knowhow in the context of a relatively harmonious social network.
To illustrate the difference between accumulating small volumes of productive knowledge and knowhow (less than one personbyte) and larger volumes (many personbytes), let's return to our music example and consider a band instead of a musician. If hiring a random person from the street was a bad approach for getting a musician, hiring a bunch of strangers is probably a worse approach for getting a band, since a band's performance adds a layer of complexity that is absent in the performance of a single musician. A successful band not only requires each musician to have a deep knowledge of her instrument but also requires musicians to know how to play together. As Pep knew was the case for a soccer team, a band is a network whose success requires a deep connection among its members, since a performance involves not simply combining sounds but beattifully weaving them together. So accumulation the knowledge and knowhow needed to have a successful band—let's say of four people—is harder than accumulating the knowledge and knowhow required for four single musicians to play individually. For example, we need to add in practice time for them to experience plying together and learn to coordinate their activities. There are also other social and economic processes that can make it difficult for people to form networks, such as the lack of a shared language or trust. I will rewiev these social processes in the next two chapters. For the time being, however, the only thing we need to know is that when these processes increase the cost of interpersonal links they limit the ability of people to form the network they need to accumulate knowledge and knowhow. Yet when obstacles are overcome and people do come together, the outcomes can be sublime. the difference between a network and a group of isolated individuals is the difference between the Beatles and the solo careers of their members, the difference between the Apollo Program and a collection of science and engineering graduates. Putting people together does not always result in endeavors of such cultural resonance, but when it does, our species can achieve things that make us all proud (or, in some other cases, ashamed.
SIMPLIFICATION
The author could have simplified and shortened this book by a couple of dozen pages by finding an expression for "knowledge and knowhow", like competence.
It is not only boring, it is dull and lacks precision.
In writing this text I simply did copy-paste of "knowledge and knowhow", and probably saved days of writing...
There has probably been a lower limit on the number of pages, posed by the publisher?