Henry Farrell

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 Weekend.

Other Writing:

Essay

European Parliament Takes a Stand – with Abraham Newman

February 26, 2010 Foreign Policy (online) with Abraham Newman
Most Americans, if they think about the European Parliament at all, probably imagine a bunch of left-wing backbenchers goofing off in Brussels or Strasbourg with little of value to say on international security. But Americans may have to update their opinion — and their approach to transatlantic cooperation — now that the European Parliament has ...
Read Article
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

November 25, 2009 eds. Karen Cook Russell Hardin and Margaret Levi Russell Sage Foundation: 2009
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 ...
Read Article
Browse the Archives