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

“The Shared Challenges of Institutional Theories: Rational Choice,” in Historical Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism, Knowledge and Institutions – eds. Johannes Glückler, Roy Suddaby and Regina Lenz

June 8, 2018 economic geography Economics eds. Johannes Glückler Roy Suddaby and Regina Lenz
Scholarship on institutions across the social sciences faces a set of fundamental dilemmas. On the one hand, it needs to explain how institutions change. Yet explanations of change which point to external factors run the risk of reducing institutions to a mere transmission belt for other, more fundamental causes. On the other, it needs to ...
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Academic Article

Trust and Political Economy: Comparing the Effects of Institutions on Inter-Firm Cooperation

June 9, 2005 Comparative Political Studies
Cooperation between small firms in “industrial districts,” where the production process may be radically dis-integrated, poses an important challenge to current political science theories of trust and cooperation. In this article, the author suggests that the problems posed by these districts—the existence of apparently irrational forms of trust in the political economy and of high-trust ...
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