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:

Academic Article

Piecing Together the Democratic Peace: The CSCE, Norms and the ‘Construction’ of Security in Post-Cold War Europe – With Gregory Flynn

January 9, 1999 International Organization with Gregory Flynn
The end of the Cold War has profoundly transformed Europe’s security situation. Although traditional security issues remain important, the most immediate threats to security since 1989 have originated not from relations between states, but from instability and conflict within states that has threatened to spill over into the interstate arena. States’ efforts to shape and ...
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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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