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:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Constructing Mid-Range Theories of Trust: The Role of Institutions” in Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (the Capstone volume of the Russell Sage Foundation project on Trust) – eds. Karen Cook, Russell Hardin and Margaret Levi

The last fifteen years have seen an explosion in research on trust, but there are still important gaps in our understanding of its sources and consequences.1 In particular, we know relatively little about the relationship between trust and the other sources of cooperation that social scientists have identified, most prominently institutions, sets of rules that ...
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Essay

The Tech Intellectuals

A quarter of a century ago, Russell Jacoby lamented the demise of the public intellectual. The cause of death was an improvement in material conditions. Public intellectuals—Dwight Macdonald, I.F. Stone, and their like—once had little choice but to be independent. They had difficulty getting permanent well-paying jobs. However, as universities began to expand, they offered ...
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