César A. Hidalgo
@cesifoti
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Scholar, author, & entrepreneur.
Toulouse, France
Joined March 2009
We have a cover! 🤩 Every book is built from an alphabet. But what if that alphabet was infinite? After years obsessing over the rules that govern how knowledge grows and decays, I’m thrilled to share with you the cover of my next book: The Infinite Alphabet: And the Laws of
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Innovation isn’t random — it follows geometric laws. Our new Behind the Paper post in @SpringerNature Communities explores how innovation forms a fractal geometry — self-organizing like a living system. cc: @NetSciConf @Nature_NPJ @FrankNeffke @cesifoti
https://t.co/ppAiMRd43o
communities.springernature.com
Why are some cities more innovative than others? Mapping more than a century of U.S. patents, our npj Complexity study reveals fractal and scaling patterns in innovation—showing how the distribution...
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How it started/How it's going. The Infinite Alphabet is out today, globally on Kindle and across bookstores in the UK. If you are curious about the history of learning curves, disruptive innovation, knowledge diffusion, and economic complexity, this book is for you. If you
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NEAR Intents just doubled its daily volume ATH with $200M in the last 24 hours 🔥 Unstoppable liquidity is NEAR
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The prompt is weird, but this result could equally be described as ChatGPT ranks younger female candidates higher than males of the same age, or that it prefers an 80 year old woman to a 40 year old man.
This week's @Nature cover highlights a report of A.I. mediated distortion When #ChatGPT was asked to rate 40,000 résumés, it ranked the older male candidates as better quality than the younger female applicants https://t.co/qTSHdxF8Ia
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1/ This chart has been making the rounds lately, and since I am an American and have both worked in a mental hospital and been a criminal defense lawyer, I have opinions. The idea that insane people belong in institutions came under 2-pronged attack in the 1950s and 1960s.
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One of the things I enjoy the most about working on international development is the missions. This week in Kigali is a reminder that all of the effort we put into our academic work is just an intermediate input. While I very much appreciate doing academic work, where the
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Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah This Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah, let's rejoice in the power of our stories. 🌟 For 25 years, the love and passion I feel for Lydia has only deepened, reminding me that our connections transcend time. How have your stories shaped your journey?
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My favorite quote from this week in Rwanda: I have no problem with China. The Chinese came and gave us roads. The Americans brought us condoms.
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Maybe one reason why people confuse GDP and market cap is that the units are unclear. GDP is a flow & should be expressed in currency per unit of time (e.g., dollars per year). Market cap is a stock, measured in dollars at a point in time. Since GDP is usually reported as just
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Just learned that the government of Philippines mentions both, the product space and economic complexity on their 2023 policy “Tatak pinoy (proudly Filipino) act”.
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Did economists here finally agree if economics is a science or not? In my experience, the answer I get usually depends on the question. When you push the idea of consilience (that all sciences must meet at the boundaries so that economics must be consistent with biology,
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C’est marrant de suivre ce débat dans deux pays. Tiré d’un papier d’octobre 2025 de David Splinter : en gris, le fameux graphique de Piketty, Saez et Zucman du taux moyen d’imposition par quintile de revenu dans sa version américaine. En rouge, la version corrigée des transferts,
Sur la taxe Zucman, je ne comprends plus rien. On est parti d’un trou dans la raquette pour les gens qui ont plus de 100 millions d’euros de patrimoine. Même les chercheurs les plus idéologues s’accordent pour reconnaître qu’hormis ce trou précis dans la raquette, notre système
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In earlier post, I highlighted replicability of the foundational behavioral economic results. In new @chicagoboothrev article, @R_Thaler explore why. Discuss two reasons: 1) Scrutiny from field at "surprising" results. 2) Following transparency norms from exp. econ. 1/n
@R_Thaler The experiments in original studies form the bedrock of behavioral economics. Given issues of replicability in social sciences, a natural question to ask: are they robust? We replicated the main experiment in each chapter's seminal work. Good news: they're *very* robust! 8/n
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Prediction is a fool’s errand, but sometimes, it’s worth being a fool. Back in 2011, we printed economic growth predictions using 2008 data in the first edition of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. Long term economic growth is notoriously hard to predict, so putting a forecast
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Good reminder of the importance of behaving politely and constructively when you have an audience.
Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts find that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online https://t.co/VGm2qZaXrW
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I was recently talking with an economics colleague who wasn’t familiar with the idea of self-organized criticality (SOC). It’s one of those counterintuitive ideas that more people should know. In a nutshell, SOC describes systems where the unstable equilibrium is the attractor
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Only 10 days left to submit to the AI for Trade challenge! More than 100 teams have already registered. We are very curious to see all of the different approaches that will come out of this competition. Stay tuned!! https://t.co/f8j2kghG8w
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Only 10 days left to submit to the AI for Trade challenge! More than 100 teams have already registered. We are very curious to see all of the different approaches that will come out of this competition. Stay tuned!! https://t.co/f8j2kghG8w
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Creative destruction in a nutshell. Firm exit rates and job destruction rates are positively correlated with growth in labor productivity.
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Academic turf war discussions are stupid because turf wars are a young man’s game. The true differentiator in academia is not field, but quality. A more experienced scholar appreciates a good qualitative study, a solid mathematical model, a sharp « heterodox » insight, or a
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In what is still my most read post, I showed how sports betting is skyrocketing in South Africa. I then made a prediction that, if trends were to continue, South Africa might reach R1 trillion of spending on sports gambling annually in 2025. This week South Africa's National
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