The Importance of Vertical Integration in Manufacturing

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There's that sweet spot. It had to be shareable, but not too shareable. I wonder what lessons there are for other things. Certainly as someone who writes books, you probably feel the same way. The first thing that happens when you write a book is pirated versions appear on the Internet. They're not that better than the physical book. So I don't think it's doing a huge amount of damage. But then how do we get to things like Henry Ford? And you have this wonderful example in the book of this giant plant. River Rouge.

Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do useful work such as pushing a piston. This is a classic example of converting information (what the gas molecules are doing) into work. But of course that kind of phenomenon is much more widespread -- it happens any time a company or organization hires someone in order to take advantage of their know-how. César Hidalgo has become an expert in this relationship between information and work, both at the level of physics and how it bubbles up into economies and societies. Looking at the world through the lens of information brings new insights into how we learn things, how economies are structured, and how novel uses of data will transform how we live.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

César Hidalgo received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Notre Dame. He currently holds an ANITI Chair at the University of Toulouse, an Honorary Professorship at the University of Manchester, and a Visiting Professorship at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. From 2010 to 2019, he led MIT’s Collective Learning group. He is the author of Why Information Grows and co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. He is a co-founder of Datawheel, a data visualization company whose products include the Observatory of Economic Complexity.