Why Information Grows
Drawing from a pivotal moment waiting for his daughter’s birth, César Hidalgo redefines information not as data, but as the physical order that shapes matter—from a baby’s blanket to a $2.5M Bugatti Veyron. Blending Boltzmann’s entropy theory with Shannon’s information science, he unpacks why ordered states are rare and how they resist the universe’s drift toward chaos. Beyond physics, Hidalgo explores the social and economic engines of information growth: how human imagination turns ideas into tangible products, how tacit knowledge and social networks constrain or enable technical progress, and why global inequality stems from uneven access to these knowledge networks. Introducing the Economic Complexity Index, he reveals how a region’s ability to build and leverage interconnected technical expertise predicts long-term prosperity. This book bridges physics, economics, and sociology to offer a radical new framework for understanding how information drives civilization’s evolution.