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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

¿Cómo conectan las propuestas para reformar Fondecyt y Becas Chile con lo que sabemos en las ciencias de la innovación? En esta columna evaluó las propuestas recientes a la luz del conocimiento de frontera en el area. www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/opi...

elmostrador.cl

Cómo, cuándo y dónde priorizar la ciencia | El Mostrador

Una buena política debe buscar un balance, pero eso implica optimizar no solamente dentro de cada instrumento, sino también entre ellos, reconociendo diferencias en objetivos y estándares de éxito.

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Reposted by Cesar A. Hidalgo

Roo Stenning @mrroobkk.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

How economies forget @cesifoti.bsky.social: www.ft.com/content/fba0... #TOK

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

5/ So here is the asymmetry. The world’s problems recur. Fortunes are a one-time thing. If the next trillion would solve what the first ten did not, that case is worth making on its own terms. A one-time pool of money is not a recurring fiscal system.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

4/ The US federal government already spends about $7 trillion a year. States and local governments spend $3 to $4 trillion more. The public sector runs on more than ten trillion a year, every year, all from current revenue.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

3/ Confiscate the top 100 billionaires on Forbes, convert it all into spending, and it funds the US federal government for a bit more than a year. And then it is gone.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

2/ And that is under heroic assumptions: that the wealth could be taxed, sold, or transferred without crashing the value. Convert the wealth of the 10 richest Americans into US government spending and it lasts about 152 days.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

1/ Everyone is thinking in trillions. Some numbers to put $1T in context. One trillion dollars roughly buys: 50 days of the US federal government 1 year of US federal interest on the debt 90 days of Chinese government spending 5 months of gov spending in Germany 6 months of gov spending in France

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Reposted by Cesar A. Hidalgo

Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford @inetoxford.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

We are looking forward to hosting @cesifoti.bsky.social @tse-fr.eu for an @inet-complexity.bsky.social seminar on Wed 11th March at Manor Road Building, to discuss his new book!

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Reposted by Cesar A. Hidalgo

Patrici Calvo @patricicalvo.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

A bit late, but I finally have "The Infinity Alphabet… and the Laws of Knowledge" by Cesar A. Hidalgo (@cesifoti.bsky.social) in my hands. A fascinating journey into knowledge and the principles that govern it.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Just got my hands on the physical copies of this cutie patootie. We will be launching this book in London in about a month.

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Pitchfork Economics @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Languages like Spanish and French distinguish between knowledge and know-how. Maybe our economic debates should, too.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

The US-Mexico border is not a dividing line, but a seam connecting thousands of value chains. Explore what it means to make something in North America at bordervalue.com

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

I would recommend this book to everyone interested in AI. After all, it is about something more general. About the I, no matter if it comes with an A or not. It is about the common problems that lead to the development of that I, and how these are shared by biological and artificial systems. 5 ⭐️!!

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

A truly refreshing read that humbles the field of AI while putting it into a broader perspective.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

From the basics of sensory input, valence, and motility Bennet takes us into neurochemistry, reinforcement learning, and credit assignment problems, showing that what we consider cutting edge research in machine learning is often something that evolution solved over one hundred million years ago.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

The book is filled with clever experiments that separate the intelligence of worms, fish, & us, while showing that we still have much in common. When do we start recognizing patterns, & why? Why do the mechanisms that allow us to learn can lead to addiction? Why is imagination a key to intelligence?

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Do you ever feel like running away when you are in an uncomfortable situation? Do you like dancing when things go your way? Well, so does this little worm.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

These innovations start with deciding a direction of motion in a multicellular organism. One of the things I found refreshing, is that Bennet explains these mechanisms using experiments on c. elegans, a microscopic worm with about 300 or neurons, which can be used to understand primitive emotions.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

In this theory, intelligence emerges in animals because, unlike plants who produce their own food, or fungi who eat what is dead, animals roam the environment searching for something to and eat. Animals grew intelligent because we started in the worse ecological niche & had to innovate to survive.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

A Brief History of Intelligence assembles the many mechanisms that contribute to intelligence in chronological order. This is not just clever structure. By explaining the problem each mechanism solves you get a deep understanding of why intelligence emerged and how it differs among species.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

This is the best book I’ve read this year. It is also an important book. In a world obsessed with AI, Max Bennett approaches intelligence from a key point of view: biology.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

The political asymmetry of the fertility crisis.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

This is one of the most fun papers that I have worked in a long time. If you want to geek out with the mathematical foundations of economic complexity theory, please give it a read.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

We also used this opportunity to embed this model into a short-run equilibrium framework showing that prices increase concavely with the complexity of a product and that economies should converge to the wages of others with similar levels of complexity.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

This allows us to easily generate output matrices as large as those observed in the empirical literature and calculate their ECI.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Our main model is a generalization of Kremer’s O-Ring model with factors that can be made specific to each economy and activity. In this model, the output of an economy in an activity is proportional to the probability that it is not missing the factors that the activity requires.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

In the product space, the core-periphery structure tells us that capabilities are correlated (e.g. Singapore scores high across all capabilities & Mali scores low). In the case of the research space, the ring structure is given by the fact that each field is only similar to a few other fields.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

We also show that our model explains differences in network structure, like those observed between the product space (a network with a core and a periphery) and the research space (which is shaped as a ring).

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

The idea that you can measure the presence of economic factors—no matter how they are defined--is an interesting departure. It provides a basis for the use of complexity measures in development. In the paper, we show this property is robust to noise & applies to other production functions.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

In a single-factor model, ECI separates economies that are better or worse endowed with the factor. In a model with many factors, ECI tells us which economies have a higher probability of being endowed with many of them--regardless of what these factors are.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

NEW PAPER: The Theory of Economic Complexity The Economic Complexity Index or ECI is a widely used empirical tool with an unclear theoretical basis. In this paper, we change that by formally deriving ECI for several production functions and showing what it really does. 👇🧵 arxiv.org/html/2506.1882…

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

What is the geography of your academic impact? Today we released new maps in Rankless. Explore citation maps for 3.8M+ scholars, 29k+ institutions, & 100s of countries. rankless.org/countries/chl

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Los €500M anunciados por la UE para atraer talento a Europa, ¿son comparables con el pago anual del endowment de Harvard o Yale? No, nuestro esfuerzo continental esta al nivel de Ohio State. En esta columna pongo a Choose Europe en contexto y ofrezco unas soluciones. elpais.com/ciencia/2025...

elpais.com

¿Fuga de cerebros en EE UU? La oportunidad de oro que Europa está a punto de desaprovechar

Muchos investigadores en el país norteamericano están más dispuestos que nunca a mudarse. Pero si queremos que consideren venirse, tenemos que ponernos serios

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Reposted by Cesar A. Hidalgo

VoxEU @ CEPR @voxeu.org · 28/04/2025

Cities in southern #Brazil appear to be places of opportunity for migrants, while northern cities offer immediate bonuses but show less of a permanent + trajectory. Workplace level segregation can explain this. E Glaeser, M Viarengo, @cesifoti.bsky.social, R Barza cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

In higher-income countries, urban proximity has been shown to enhance workers’ skills and income, but less is known about low- and middle-income countries. This column examines how the income of initially poor workers in Brazil changes after urban migration. Wages go up immediately for migrants to both southern and northern Brazilian cities, but only in the wealthier southern cities do initially poor migrants see a longer-term positive effect. Workplace segregation appears to play a key role, as southern firms do more to bring skilled and unskilled workers together.

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Reposted by Cesar A. Hidalgo

Márton Karsai @martonkarsai.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Open postdoc position at @ceu-dnds.bsky.social in Vienna in the Computational Human Dynamics Lab of @martonkarsai.bsky.social on inequalities in 15-minutes cities in collaboration with www.dut-coline.org. Check it out: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-P... @ic2s2.bsky.social @netscisociety.bsky.social

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

19. This was a great collaboration with the always amazing Viktor Stojkoski You can download the working paper at: www.tse-fr.eu/publications...

tse-fr.eu

Optimizing Economic Complexity

Viktor Stojkoski, and César Hidalgo, “Optimizing Economic Complexity”, TSE Working Paper, n. 24-1623, March 2025.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

18. Our results show that there are more careful & principled ways to define diversification opportunities. ECI optimization is a flexible method to achieve this, since the forecasting function & optimization constraint can be changed to accommodate to different criterion.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

17. Relatedness-complexity diagrams have been around for a long time (in 2011 we published them under the name: Export-Opportunity Spectrum (sorry for that :-)). But more recently, they have become a core tool for the consulting industry focused on smart specialization.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

16. First, the algorithm leverages an economy's current specialization pattern better. Second, it solves the portfolio problem by providing suggestions that balance related and unrelated diversification opportunities.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

15. Interestingly, the strategy defined by this algorithm is quite different from the one obtained from relatedness-complexity diagrams.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

14. Using these targets, we define an optimization problem that chooses the optimal combination of activities that an economy will need to specialize in to achieve a target level of complexity with "minimum effort."

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

13. We then use this forecast to estimate the target level of specialization an economy will need to achieve within a time period to be on track to specialize in a product.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

12. The method starts by defining a model forecasting the evolution of comparative advantage as a function of multiple measures of relatedness and other variables.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

11. In our new working paper, we develop an optimization method that addresses these limitations by defining an industrial diversification strategy that minimizes the effort required for an economy to achieve a target level of economic complexity.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

10. Third. We know from theoretical work that optimal diversification strategies require targeting related and unrelated diversification opportunities. Relatedness-complexity diagrams do not provide that balance. There is an open question of how to determine that portfolio.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

9. Ignoring these changes can lead to overestimating the potential contribution of an industry to the economy (what is hot today may be "passé" tomorrow).

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

8. This drop was not because cars became less sophisticated, but because many middle- and lower-income economies began exporting them (e.g. Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, South Africa). (Complexity is a relative measure of sophistication)

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

7. Second. Relatedness-complexity diagrams ignore the fact that these variables change over time. These changes can be substantial. Between 1962 and 2016 cars fell from being the 17th product in terms of complexity to the 208th (out of 817 products).

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Cesar A. Hidalgo @cesifoti.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

6. First, relatedness is an incomplete measure of economic potential. Estimating en economy’s probability of "entering" an activity requires a model with many variables. Using relatedness as "the" measure of potential confuses a model's component with the full model. Not good.

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