César Hidalgo

“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

“economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”

― César Hidalgo

“Products augment us, and this is a great reason why we want them.”

― César Hidalgo

“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

“entropy is always lurking on the borders of information-rich anomalies,”

― César Hidalgo

“The universe is made of energy, matter, and information, but information is what makes the universe interesting.”

― César Hidalgo

“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.”

― César 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

“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 Hidalgo

“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 Hidalgo

“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 Hidalgo

“Life is a consequence of the ability of matter to compute.”

― 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

“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