Public Writing
Featured Essays:
Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
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Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
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Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
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Interview 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 ...
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Interviews
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Essays
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. ...
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Senseless Spying: The National Security Agency’s Self-Defeating Espionage Against the EU – with Abraham Newman
Political leaders in Europe have not been shy in expressing their anger about recent revelations about the United States spying on the EU. Germany’s justice ...
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Half Poulantzas, Half Kindleberger
Once upon a time, international political economy (as it is studied by American international relations professors) and international political economy (as it is studied by ...
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There is no alternative
Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic ...
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Tom Coburn Doesn’t Like Political Science
Sen. Tom Coburn doesn’t like political science. Since 2009 the Oklahoma senator has been trying to ban National Science Foundation funds for political-science research. His ...
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Slaves of Defunct Economists: Why Politicians Pursue Austerity Policies That Never Work
On January 25, the British statistics office announced that the United Kingdom’s economy had shrunk by 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. After ...
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A More Imperfect Union: On the European Central Bank
How a central bank created to exist apart from politics got drawn into bitter political arguments. In September, the European Central Bank announced that it ...
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Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring with Sean Aday, Marc Lynch, John Sides and Deen Freelon
Based on Twitter and Facebook data gathered during the 2011 Arab revolutions, the authors of this Peaceworks report find that new media informed international audiences ...
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Google and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy
Using The Princess Bride to explain Google’s corporate policies: A blogpost that I wrote elsewhere, complaining about Google, has led to a disagreement between Kevin ...
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How Enduring Is American Economic Inequality?
Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz in a review essay (gated) in the most recent issue of Perspectives on Politics. Certainly there were many important welfare ...
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Zoned (On the European Union)
European integration is boring, even when it is exciting. Over the past eighteen months, crisis has piled upon crisis in the European Union’s single-currency area, ...
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Do the Right Thing with – Cosma Shalizi
Benevolent meddling won’t help us make good decisions. We have all cringed watching friends and family make terrible decisions, and been tempted by visions of ...
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Can the European Union Be Saved? with John Quiggin
Europe is on the brink of disaster—again. The possibility of a Greek default sent the markets roiling on Tuesday. And despite more than $2 trillion ...
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Bubble Trouble
In a 2009 book about the social consequences of the Internet, The Age of the Infovore, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen argues that new ...
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How to Save the Euro – and the EU: Reading Keynes in Brussels with John Quiggin
John Quiggin and I have a “piece”:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67761/henry-farrell-and-john-quiggin/how-to-save-the-euro-and-the-eu on the eurozone mess in the new issue of _Foreign Affairs._ The piece is subscriber-only, but we’re allowed ...
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