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

Institutions and Majority Rule in Online Communities – with Melissa Schwartzberg

October 9, 2008 Ethics and International Affairs with Melissa Schwartzberg
Norms, Minorities, and Collective Choice Online Much work in political science and political theory, ranging from the arguments of eighteenth-century political theorists, such as Condorcet and Rousseau, to modern social-choice theory, concerns the relationship between decision rules and collective choice. It is emphatically clear that the former have important consequences for the latter. Individuals’ preferences ...
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Academic Article

Making Global Markets: Historical Institutionalism in International Political Economy, Introduction to Special Issue on Historical Institutionalism and International Market Regulation – with Abraham Newman

October 9, 2010 Review of International Political Economy with Abraham Newman
As dramatically evidenced by the global financial crisis, the interaction of domestic regulatory systems has significant international consequences. Nevertheless, these relationships have received only limited attention from international relations scholars. This special issue, therefore, provides a de- tailed examination of international market regulation – the processes through which the domestic regulatory activities of states and ...
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