Chris Aldrich

@MindfulnessEngi what's your favorite text(book) on resilience and cities?

My reply to @PeterCoffee "Information should be more ‘force’ than ‘mass’" | Diginomica

You're certainly asking the right types of questions here, but doing so in a somewhat flimsy framework in what is already a fairly solid mathematical theory. Mathematicians would call this a "hand-waving argument." Some of your conceptualization is clouded by mistaking the semantics of the commonly accepted definition of information with Claude Shannon's formal mathematical definition, something which he admonishes the reader about in the opening paragraphs of his seminal paper.

I would suggest that you take a look at Cesar Hidalgo's recent and very accessible book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (MIT Press, 2015) [http://amzn.to/1MrA7Pf] which provides a more rigorous grounding of what information is and what it means, particularly within the context of economics and global business. In it, he re-frames your questions and provides a firmer theoretical platform for seeing farther and moving faster. The framework he provides will provide a more solid grounding for what is happening within the growing digital economy and proliferation of areas like big data.

For those who want to take the economics piece a step further, one can then delve into the broader topics at the intersection of fields like complexity theory and economics similar to those framed by the Santa Fe Institute over the past two decades. (W. Brian Arthur's Complexity and the Economy, (Oxford, 2014) [http://amzn.to/1MrB5ex] is a fairly good starting point without getting too deep too quickly for most).

From a business perspective, these theories underpin many of the ideas expounded by Judith Rodin's The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong (Public Affairs, 2014) or many of the probabilistic arguments made in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's various works.