3 Questions: Economies as computers, products as information
Cesar Hidalgo, the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, has a PhD in statistical physics, but he’s applied the tools of that discipline to topics ranging from the dissemination of cultural information to economic development. In 2012, he signed a contract with Basic Books to write a book about his views on economic development. But once he started writing, he began to think of economic development as an aspect of a more general phenomenon: the growth of physical order, or information. In the end, a description of his research on economic development constitutes the final fourth of a book titled “Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,” published this month. Hidalgo discussed the book with MIT News. Q. How are you using the term “information”? A. I use information to refer to raw physical order. At the beginning of chapter...