Why do some countries’ economies grow faster?
Where do you make your academic home if your PhD is in physics, you did a postdoc at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and you’re researching macroeconomic theories that defy the conventional wisdom in the field? The MIT Media Lab, naturally.That, at least, is the unusual career path taken by César Hidalgo, one of two new assistant professors to join the Media Lab last fall. Hidalgo says that one of his heroes is Francis Bacon, the 16th-century English statesman, philosopher, lawyer and essayist generally credited with inventing the scientific method, and it’s the breadth of Bacon’s intellectual appetite that Hidalgo finds inspiring. In his PhD thesis, Hidalgo applied mathematical tools largely derived from statistical physics to problems in economics and urban planning and to the analysis of cell-phone networks; in other work, he’s used similar tools to study...