Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas

Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion.

Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big tech breakup would mean for security and privacy, why political economics suggests Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t work, what Italy might reveal about China’s feature, his family connection to Joyce, his undying affection for My Bloody Valentine, why Philip K. Dick would have reveled in QAnon, why Twitter seems left-wing, and being a first generation academic blogger.

Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas (Ep. 78, Conversations with Tyler podcast)

Learn more on the Conversations with Tyler Podcast website.

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development: Alternatives to the New Determinism in Political Economy

The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Socialist Surrealism: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels,” in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction – eds. Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox

How do politics and the science fiction and fantasy genres inform each other? Science fiction has always had a strong undercurrent of utopianism – writers as different in their ideological predilections as Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Frederick Pohl have used it as a means to reimagine political and social arrangements better to their ...
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