Why Information Grows
The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Hoye
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By:
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César Hidalgo
About this listen
What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.
At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order - or information - disappears. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Although cities are all pockets where information grows, they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish little more than pulling rocks out of the ground. So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil's, and Brazil's that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston's Route 128 languish, while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information.
Seen from Hidalgo's vantage, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows lays bare the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do not just more things, but more interesting things.
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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.
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Bucky, Bucky, Bucky
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What Is Life?
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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?
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Profound & Life Changing...
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Future Shock
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Future Shock is about the present. Future Shock is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations - even our patterns of friendship and love. Future Shock vividly describes the emerging global civilization: tomorrow's family life, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships - all of them temporary. It illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless cliches about today.
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So Accurate
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Machine, Platform, Crowd
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In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help listeners make the most of our collective future. Machine | Platform | Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.
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Both How AND Why for Techies
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Andrew Smart wants you to sit and do nothing much more often - and he has the science to explain why. At every turn we’re pushed to do more, faster, and more efficiently: That drumbeat resounds throughout our wage-slave society. Multitasking is not only a virtue, it’s a necessity. But Andrew Smart argues that slackers may have the last laugh. The latest neuroscience shows that the “culture of effectiveness” is not only ineffective, it can be harmful to your well-being.
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Not worth it.
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When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.
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Mostly platitudes with no depth
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We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.
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Good to know ...
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The Mind of the Market will change the way we think about the economics of everyday life. Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Michael Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy.
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Good ideas overshadowed by obnoxious polemics
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The Great Mental Models
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The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
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A dissapointing debut
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Nonzero
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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.
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Non-Zero (but pretty close to zero)
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.
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Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow
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What listeners say about Why Information Grows
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark Augustini
- 09-19-16
a delightful journey
Listened twice:) A great book with a wide and though provoking historical perspective that packs a punch !
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3 people found this helpful
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- Johann Cohen
- 08-07-23
Very very good
Really informative and a good read. Worth picking up and giving it a read. Now!
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- T. Leach
- 09-15-16
Great book! The breath of the framework
Is astonishingly beautiful. It will be hard for anyone who reads and understand this work to look at the world the same. I have been fascinated with information theory, biology, and physics for years. The author brings them all together in an accessible way. Breathtaking work!
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7 people found this helpful
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- Spencer
- 01-01-17
Very direct explanation of economies
To oversimplify a fair bit , the author explain in more detail and using a lot more physics what Hayek try to outline in his influential 1945 paper the use of knowledge in society. the only way I can sort of describe this book is it is a cross between Thomas Sowell's book "Knowledge and Decisions" and Matt Ridley's book "The Evolution of Everything" with a bunch of complexity theory mixed in.
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3 people found this helpful
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- B. Ramos-Stephens
- 03-02-18
Slow at start but packed with insights
The beginning is slow due to the need to define various concepts & terms. But, as this read/listen picks up, it contains insights & information that are presented in a much more dense, faster & thus more interesting pace. Towards the end (and, especially in the epilogue), it reaches its crescendo & brings the concepts together, elaborating on the promising narrative of the Audible summary.
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- Kahlo
- 06-12-19
CESAR HIDALGO is a man *to watch*
This short book is difficult to characterize. Its scope is broad but it goes deep. The parts on information are extremely important and compelling. On economics, I'm not much of an authority but sounds promising. Essential for students of cognitive neuroscience and mindsciences in general. A background in computation is helpful but not essential.
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- roxane googin
- 01-05-18
Deep yet concise. innovative.
Hidalgo presents innovative ideas with just the right level of in depth justification. The story keeps moving to the end.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-01-23
Possibly my favorite book
It’s like economic and ecosystem poetry! It tickled the part of my mind that is almost always self stimulated only. I’m so glad that people are discussing higher order without the common corruption Trojan horse that is most books on information. I loved it and will relisten and relisten!! Well done! Great job! Much appreciation for the time and effort you have spent focusing on this!!!!
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- bpjammin
- 01-07-17
Great book!
This may be the most eloquently written science book I’ve ever read and one that manages to make extremely complicated information easier to comprehend. It is certainly comparable to Feynman’s Lectures, in terms of reducing the complex to simpler subsets for the novice, which Hidalgo manages to do without use of complex mathematics.
During the past year I have listened to/read dozens of science books concerning genetics, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory, cognitive & evolutionary neuroscience and one of the things I noticed was that all this evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and that certain aspects of evolution can't be explained by Darwinian theory, leading some to speculate about "design," however, I stumbled upon this book on information theory and it resolves most of the problems aforementioned without resorting to design.
Also, without ever referencing McLuhan, this book elucidates many of McLuhan’s aphorisms: like The Media (transmission of content) is The Message (content has no intrinsic meaning,) and McLuhan’s assertion that technologies are evolutionary extensions (wheel extends foot, phone extends voice…) are also supported by information theory as presented here.
What surprised me most was the lack of any reference to Information Theory in any of the books I have read concerning the physical sciences. How can Evolutionary Theory have missed such a big data set necessary to extend its own theories? It’s a glaring omission from the works I’ve read thus far.
Great book!
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12 people found this helpful
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- Katherine Ernst
- 08-31-17
Could be better written
You get the sense that the man who wrote this book had the attitude that you should never state something simply if you can polish some $20 word. I have a huge vocabulary and still had to rewind on a few occasions to figure out what the author was trying to say. Some might think this makes the book "smart" but I've generally found if you can't make a point succinctly, you haven't entirely crystallized for yourself what you're trying to say.
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1 person found this helpful