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

Trust provides a noncontractual, informal, yet highly efficient mechanism to deter malfeasance and enable otherwise risky commercial interactions.

In his 1995 book Trust, he argues that the ability of a society to form large networks is largely a reflection of that society’s level of trust. Fukuyama makes a strong distinction between what he calls “familial” societies, like those of southern Europe and Latin America, and “high-trust” societies, like those of Germany, the United States, and Ja

the fact that we need more bits to communicate a state in which everyone has randomly chosen a seat in the stadium or in which the bits in a hard drive have been randomly flipped does not mean that these are states that embody more order or information.

We can simplify this discussion by defining the maximum amount of knowledge and knowhow that a human nervous system can accumulate as a fundamental unit of measurement. We call this unit a personbyte, and define it as the maximum knowledge and knowhow carrying capacity of a human.

Another distinction that I should mention up front is the one between information as something and information about something, such as the information we transmit in a message. Think of a car. I can tell you that my car is red and has a six-speed manual transmission and a 1.6 liter engine. This is all information about my car, but it is not the in

Thinking about products as crystals of imagination helps us understand the importance of the source of the information that is embodied in a product.

Complex products are not just arrangements of atoms that perform functions; rather, they are ordered arrangements of atoms that originated as imagination.

Also, the DNA example tells us that the presence of information is independent from our ability to decode it.

Knowledge and knowhow are so “heavy” that when it comes to a simple product such as a cellphone battery, it is infinitely easier to bring the lithium atoms that lie dormant in the Atacama Desert to Korea than to bring the knowledge of lithium batteries that resides in Korean scientists to the bodies of the miners who populate the Atacaman cities of