From: Joi Ito
To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com>
Subject: Re:
Date: Sun, 07 Jun 2015 12:55:42 +0000
Not your old age question?
-)
It's like Jeopardy except that Watson won't have the answer.
One of my faculty, Cesar Hidalgo, recently wrote a book called "Why Information Grows".
http://www.amazon.corn/Why-Information-Grows-Evolution-Economiesidp/0465048994
I haven't read it yet, but I've had some conversations with him. He's trying to approach it from a physics
perspective and agues that life is "information" and "order". Not sure this is right.
"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 antidisciplinarian Cesar 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--will disappear. 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. Our cities are pockets where information grows, but 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 off 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 bear 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, but more
interesting things."
> On Jun 7, 2015, at 6:51 AM, jeffrey E. leevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
> my age old question . if LIFE is the answer , what is the question, what set of problems are living
systems solving for?
> --
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