My reply to: Daniel Tung's answer to What do people think of Cesar Hidalgo's thesis in Why Information Grows? - Quora https:/
I've read his book and think his views are more nuanced than you posit. Shortly, I hope to write a longer review, so for now I'll add some more nuance and some facts to the comments above.
I think Hidalgo would disagree with the criticism of his view in part A. I suggest you read his first few chapters to better tease apart how Hidalgo (and even Shannon himself) viewed information. In Shannon's original paper (in the second paragraph!) he totally divorces the semantic meaning of the message and only considers the mathematical portion of the information. Hidalgo follows along with this premise (page xvi in his introduction), though he doesn't go as deeply into the semantics of the example you've given, primarily as the target audience for the book is the mass market rather than specialists. From a thermodynamics perspective, the system under consideration was never just the Bugatti (which is the view Daniel is taking), but the system is the larger universe which includes the Bugatti, and all of the potential people in the societies which might encounter that Bugatti, including the New Guinean Highlanders who might view it as relatively worthless.
As for the criticism in part B, Hidalgo on page 105 queries us: "Are iPhones Californian, Chinese, or Korean? With the dismemberment of production, the nationality of products no longer makes much sense." Here Hidalgo takes an external view of everything, which is much more sophisticated than the simpler viewpoints he takes earlier in the text in which he looks at individual economies with respect to each other. Here Daniel's criticism simply suffers from not having all the facts or examples Hidalgo provides.