You wrote a book : ‘ Why Information grows : the evolution from atoms to economies ’. You present a different model for evaluating economics based on matter and information . Could you explain that complex system ?
What the book tries to describe is that economies grow as they develop knowledge collectively , which I call ‘ capacity to compute ’.
Economies grow if together we are able to create things of increasing complexity and order . With this , a lot of things can limit our capacity to work together . For example , there ’ s a whole chapter on trust . Societies that have a lot of trust can create large networks compared to societies where there are low levels of trust . If economic development is an accumulation of knowledge that allows you to do difficult things , like creating a plane or a complex pharmaceutical , then we need to create those large networks . The level of trust is going to limit the ability to accumulate that knowledge , because the knowledge that society has is a lot greater than the knowledge that an individual can have . Very early on , hundreds of thousands of years ago we reached a point , when what a human could know , is less than what society knows , and we were forced to start dividing knowledge . When that happened , our species took a very different path from others . We developed culture and the way we interacted together began to matter much more , because learning at the collective level became more important than at the individual level . If you think about insects , many of them never meet their parents . They ’ re just born out of an egg and start running , they don ’ t have culture and every insect knows what is known in the insect world . But we know so much more than what an individual knows , so what matters is how we put all that knowledge together in terms of people . We are parts of a whole that is much bigger than one can contribute .