Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

Hidalgo, a physicist working at the MIT Media Lab, proposes that economic development is fundamentally the accumulation of information embodied in physical products and the networks of people who know how to make them. He calls this "economic complexity" and measures it by analysing which countries export which products, revealing that the structure of an economy's knowledge network predicts its growth better than traditional macroeconomic indicators. The argument connects thermodynamics (why information is rare in the universe), biology (how organisms accumulate information), and economics (why some countries are rich and others are not) into a single framework. Hidalgo draws on the work of Schrödinger, Prigogine, and Romer but goes further by making the information-economy connection empirically measurable. The book bridges the Brynjolfsson digital-economy axis and the Castells network-society axis in a genuinely new way, grounded in physics rather than sociology.