Where does economic growth really come from? (with W. Brian Arthur and Cesar Hidalgo)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is economic growth all about money, trade, and GDP, or are healthy economies built on a different foundation? In this episode, economist W. Brian Arthur and MIT physicist Cesar Hidalgo explain why human knowledge, knowhow, and innovation are the best measures of rising prosperity and future economic growth. Guest Bios W. Brian Arthur: Economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns, and one of the pioneers of the science of complexity. Author of three books including The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves. External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Cesar Hidalgo: Physicist, writer, and entrepreneur. Associate Professor at MIT, and Director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. Co-founder of Datawheel, a company that specializes in digital transformation solutions for governments and large companies. Author of Why Information Grows and co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. Twitter: @cesifoti Further reading: Complexity Economics: a different framework for economic thought: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftuvalu.santafe.edu%2F~wbarthur%2FPapers%2FComp.Econ.SFI.pdf Economic Complexity: From useless to keystone: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchidalgo.com%2Fs%2Fnphys4337.pdf Complexity Economics Shows Us Why Laissez-Faire Economics Always Fails: http://evonomics.com/complexity-economics-shows-us-that-laissez-faire-fail-nickhanauer/

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think we've made this mistake of politically or culturally idealizing a system that was never meant to become a cultural ideal.
0:15.0	Complexity is really where our wealth, our standard of living, comes from in a modern society.
0:23.0	It's rather like saying we want to look at how butterflies fly
0:27.0	and to do that we'll chloroform them and nail them to a board
0:31.0	and then figure out.
0:33.0	From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with Nick Hanauer, where we explore
0:46.2	everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101. I'm David Goldstein Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
0:53.8	So Nick, in Ephes.
0:59.8	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:04.2	So Nick, in episode five, we ended by talking about what a sucky measure of growth GDP is Yes. Yeah and we promised in this episode we'd come up with
1:17.8	something a little better. Yeah. So what do we have? Well I think that if you're going
1:22.2	to talk about growth in any sort of
1:25.1	meaningful way you have to examine the question growth of what? Like what do we want
1:32.0	more of money?
1:33.2	Well, you know that indeed thinking about money is the conventional way to think about
1:39.4	prosperity and growth and market economies. As in the more money you have, the more growth you have and the
1:45.2	more prosperous you are. But there's a really easy way to see why money is actually not a very good way to conceptualize prosperity.
1:57.0	And it is to imagine yourself as king or queen of the, and having a ton of money, all the money in your society,
2:09.5	I don't know what it would be, in beads or shells or whatever it was.
2:14.1	Let's say gold.
2:15.1	Yeah, gold.
2:16.1	Lots of gold.
	...

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