💥 What we can learn about economic growth from a crashed Bugatti

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … education scholar Rick Hess on American schools

In This Issue

The Essay: What we can learn about economic growth from a crashed Bugatti

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … education scholar Rick Hess on American schools

Micro Reads: longevity, desalination, asteroid mining, and more

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Quote of the Issue

“How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning” - Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise

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The Essay

💥 What we can learn about economic growth from a crashed Bugatti

I occasionally write about flying cars. In this issue, however, let’s consider crashing cars. Specifically, imagine an $18.7 million Bugatti La Voiture Noire — perhaps the most expensive car in the world — crashing into a wall at something approaching its top speed of 255 mph. Although I’m not much of a car guy, I would think this marvel of automobile engineering would be little more than 4,400 pounds of carbon-fiber scrap. Yet moments before the spectacular impact, it would have been worth roughly $4,250 a pound. The moment after, pretty much nothing per pound.

So what changed? Why is the pre-crash Bugatti worth infinitely more than the post-crash Bugatti? They both contain the same number of atoms, after all. The amount of matter in one is the same as the other. The only real difference between the two vehicles — and this is the important thing — is how that matter is arranged.

Bugatti La Voiture Noire

The physical arrangement of atoms is what some academics mean by the term “information,” although that’s not how the rest of us use the term. But if you think of information in this special way, as the physical order of atoms, then when that order is changed — such as when an auto crashes or sand is turned into a microchip — there has been a change in information. In the first case, the change has led to less complexity, in the second case more. And value is embedded in complexity. All the value in the pre-crash Bugatti was stored in the complex arrangement of its atoms, not in the atoms themselves.

This sort of car example is a favorite of statistical physicist Cesar Hidalgo of the University of Toulouse. In a conversation with me a few years back, he also described the process this way: “If you take a deck of cards and you shuffle it, you don’t change the mass, you don’t change the energy, but you change the information that it contains. And the creativity of our universe and our economy depends on our ability to create information, to change the way in which things are ordered.”