---
description: Objects embody imagination-derived information enabling users to access practical uses of knowledge and knowhow without possessing that knowledge themselves
type: framework
domain: teleological-economics
created: 2026-02-16
source: "Hidalgo, Why Information Grows (2015)"
confidence: proven
tradition: "complexity economics, information theory, network science"
---

Hidalgo draws a fundamental distinction between two kinds of products: those that existed first in the world and then in our heads (like edible apples), and those that existed first in someone's head and then in the world (like Apple computers). Only the latter are "crystals of imagination" -- physical embodiments of information that originated as mental computation. This distinction reframes what the economy actually produces: not goods and services in the traditional sense, but packets of physically embodied information whose source is human imagination.

The critical insight is that products do far more than carry information -- they augment their users. A guitar lets someone "sing with their hands" by embodying the Pythagorean scale, woodworking knowledge, and transducer physics. Toothpaste gives access to the practical uses of fluoride chemistry without requiring the user to synthesize sodium fluoride. Products are amplifiers: they endow people with capacities that vastly exceed their individual knowledge. This makes the economy not a system for managing resources but a "knowledge and knowhow amplification engine" -- a sociotechnical system that produces physical packages containing the information needed to augment the humans who participate in it.

Three functions follow from this. First, crystallized imagination creates a society of "phony geniuses" whose effective capacities far surpass their actual knowledge. Second, it provides the only mechanism for sharing the practical uses of knowledge with others -- talking about toothpaste cannot clean your teeth, because practicality hinges on tangibility, not narrative. Third, the augmentation liberates creative capacity through combinatorial creativity: Jimmy Page could create "Stairway to Heaven" only because he didn't have to mine metals and build his own guitar. Each crystal of imagination frees its user to imagine the next one, creating a ratchet of increasing complexity.

This framework connects directly to [[intelligence is a property of networks not individuals]] by showing the physical mechanism through which distributed knowledge becomes accessible. It also illuminates why [[collective intelligence requires diversity as a structural precondition not a moral preference]] -- diverse knowledge embodied in diverse products creates the combinatorial space from which new imagination can crystallize.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[intelligence is a property of networks not individuals]] -- crystallized imagination is the mechanism by which network-distributed knowledge becomes individually accessible
- [[collective intelligence requires diversity as a structural precondition not a moral preference]] -- product diversity reflects and requires knowledge diversity in the network that produces it
- [[economic complexity emerges from the diversity and exclusivity of nontradable capabilities not from tradable inputs]] -- crystallized imagination explains why capabilities are nontradable: the knowhow behind products cannot be transmitted through the products themselves
- [[specialization and value form an autocatalytic feedback loop where each amplifies the other exponentially]] -- products as augmenters create the ratchet mechanism through which specialization compounds
- [[the personbyte is a fundamental quantization limit on knowledge accumulation forcing all complex production into networked teams]] -- products requiring more than one personbyte of knowhow necessitate the network structures that crystallize distributed imagination
- [[economies cannot replicate knowhow like biology because they lack the intimate marriage of information and computation that DNA and cells provide]] -- products transmit the practical uses of knowhow but not the knowhow itself, which is why economies lack biological reproduction efficiency
- [[the product space constrains diversification to adjacent products because knowledge and knowhow accumulate only incrementally through related capabilities]] -- the topology of products reflects the adjacency structure of the knowhow required to crystallize them
- [[trust is the binding constraint on network size and therefore on the complexity of products an economy can produce]] -- trust determines how large the network of crystallizers can grow and therefore how complex the products can be
- [[products are crystals of imagination because they embody information that originated in minds before existing in the world]] -- source-faithful treatment of Hidalgo's original argument on products as physically embodied imagination

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]