The Computational Engine of Economic Development

I realize its not a technical publication, but this piece is real hand wavy.<p>Yes, a modern economy consumes energy reduces local entropy of atoms though agriculture, transportation and manufacture. This can be considered computation.<p>But then: &quot;Late in the last decade, I developed a mathematical technique that can be used to characterize an economy’s ability to produce products. This measure of economic complexity, which makes use of information about the diversity of countries and the ubiquity of products, explains a substantial fraction of a country’s level of income, but it also explains future economic growth.&quot;<p>There is no substantial explanation of this measure and how it is constructed. If it can&#x27;t be stated simply one suspects it is subject to manipulation and its predictive power might just be an artifact of its construction.

I appreciate this perspective on understanding national economies. After the big meltdown in 2008-9 I started thinking that major economic events could also be seen as information processing events.<p>Some Tofflerian quotes from the article:<p>&quot;under the hood, products are made of order — or information&quot;<p>&quot;the actions we use to make products are acts of computation&quot;<p>&quot;just as objects are a more fundamental form of economic value than currency, the ability to create objects is a more fundamental form of economic value than the objects themselves&quot;

This is very interesting indeed. But I wonder...why is Chile importing so many <i>centrifuges</i> from South Korea? 1.9% of their exports?

Related to this: are there any good approaches to economic simulations of economies at the individual and organizational level? In other words, literally simulate groups of people and the economic organizations that they belong to.

This rephrases why education is important.<p>Also, they fail to explain that Europe has lots of computational power in IT, while the real monetization seems to be happening mostly in the US.

This doesn&#x27;t seem to account for things like bureaucracy or regulations that slow economic growth.