You Can't Tariff Knowledge (with César Hidalgo)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tariffs won’t save America’s economy—but knowledge might. In the third episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy sit down with physicist César Hidalgo to explore how prosperity really grows—not through tariffs or trickle-down promises, but through the accumulation of knowledge and know-how. Hidalgo explains why digital exports don’t show up in trade data, why tariffs fail, and why the future belongs to countries that invest in research, strategy, and human talent. César Hidalgo is the director of the Center for Collective Learning, with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest. A physicist by training, he is also the founder of Datawheel, a company specializing in data visualization and distribution systems. Hidalgo is the author of Why Information Grows, a groundbreaking book on the relationship between knowledge, innovation, and economic prosperity, and his forthcoming book, The Infinite Alphabet and the Laws of Knowledge, explores the dynamics of how knowledge evolves and diffuses globally. Social Media: @cesifoti.bsky.social @cesifoti Further reading: Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies The Infinite Alphabet and the Laws of Knowledge Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social TikTok: @pitchfork_econ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
0:10.9	The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven't worked.
0:14.7	But what's the alternative?
0:16.3	Middle-out economics is the answer.
0:18.6	Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
0:23.1	That's right.
0:28.6	This is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out.
0:36.9	Welcome to the show. We've been talking a lot
0:42.7	about trade on the podcast, Nick, recently. And today, I think we're going to talk to maybe the
0:49.2	only person who seems to know anything about it. I mean, at a fundamental level.
0:56.2	Yeah, I agree.
0:57.8	Today we get to talk to our old friend, Cesar Hidalgo.
1:00.5	Yeah, we're huge fans of Cesar and his work and his collaborations with Ricardo
1:07.7	Hausman and others about economic complexity and just how the economy, like,
1:14.4	actually works at the most fundamental level.
1:16.8	Right.
1:17.3	His way of understanding it is just so applicable to the arguments about trade that we're
1:23.4	having now and tariffs and the rest of it.
1:25.8	And, you know, Cesar wrote a book that I think you and I
1:28.9	both agree is one of the best on economics we've ever read. It's a sometimes difficult little book.
1:34.3	Yeah.
1:34.5	First of all, Cesar is a physicist. Yeah. By training, not an economist. And his book, Why Information
	...

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