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:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Trust, Distrust, and Power” in Distrust – ed. Russell Hardin

May 20, 2004 2004 ed. Russell Hardin Russell Sage Foundation
The so-called “encapsulated interest” account of trust, developed by Russell Hardin together with other interested scholars, draws together an important body of thought about trust and its meaning in social and personal relations.1 Trust, under this account, involves considered expectations about the interests of others to behave in a trustworthy manner. Some scholars argue that ...
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Essay

Reading Milton Friedman in Dublin

May 1, 2010 The Washington Monthly
When I first came to the United States from Ireland in the early 1990s, Americans thought of my home country as a land of green fields, bibulous peasants, and perhaps the occasional leprechaun. Once, on a bus from Ann Arbor to Detroit, a fellow passenger heard my accent and asked if she could touch me ...
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