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

Will Governments Restrict Foreign Access to Pandemic Supplies? – with Abraham Newman

March 23, 2020 Harvard Business Review (online) with Abraham Newman
As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, there is a lurking threat that we can no longer ignore: What happens if countries hoard or even nationalize vital resources to fight the disease? On March 2, according to the New York Times, the White House tried to persuade CureVac, a German company that is working on a Covid-19 ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Collective Goods in the Local Economy: The Packaging Machinery Cluster in Bologna,” Local Production Systems in Europe: Reconstruction and Innovation – with Ann-Louise Holten – ed. Colin Crouch, Patrick Le Galès, Carlo Trigilia and Helmut Voelzkow

February 26, 2004 ed. Colin Crouch Patrick Le Galès Carlo Trigilia and Helmut Voelzkow Oxford University Press 2004 with Ann-Louise Holten
The debate about the industrial districts of central and north-eastern Italy has evolved over the last 25 years. Initially, many saw them as evidence that small firms could prosper contrary to the arguments of the proponents of big industry. Debate focussed on whether small firm industrial districts had a genuine independent existence, or were the ...
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