-
1 week ago | 
programmablemutter.com | Henry Farrell
[image by Brian Eno, from “77 Million Paintings.” Eno says in this dialogue that he doesn’t mind people using these images for non-commercial purposes]This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to.
-
3 weeks ago | 
indybay.org | Henry Farrell
The free market is an impossible utopia By Henry Farrell Fred Block (research professor of sociology at University of California at Davis) and Margaret Somers (professor of sociology and history at the University of Michigan) have a new book, "The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique" (Harvard University Press, 2014).
-
1 month ago | 
foreignaffairs.com | Michelle Gavin |Henry Farrell |Abraham L. Newman |Laura Gamboa
Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe. Just a decade ago, these companies believed that information technology would limit the power of governments and liberalize the world.
-
1 month ago | 
insidestory.org.au | Henry Farrell
The reactionary right is not a monolith J.D. Vance is attempting to straddle two diametrically different tendencies on the radical right We have a tendency to overestimate how unified our political adversaries are, because of a particular version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” When we look at our own side, we all too easily see the incoherence, the petty feuding, bickering and incompetence. When we look at the other, it appears to be possessed by a single...
-
1 month ago | 
programmablemutter.com | Henry Farrell
We have a tendency to over-estimate how unified our political adversaries are, because of a particular version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” When we look at our own side, we all too easily see the incoherence, the petty feuding, bickering and incompetence. When we look at the other, it appears to be possessed by a single purpose, marching in lockstep to a coherent evil plan.
-
1 month ago | 
democracyjournal.org | Henry Farrell
When Elon Musk brought the U.S. government to the brink of shutdown over a spending bill in December, he boasted of a victory for democracy. As Musk described the outcome on X, which he owns: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed. VOX POPULI / VOX DEI.”The voice was not divine, but rather Musk’s own, amplified by a social media platform that he has partly reconstructed around his own prejudices and predilections.
-
2 months ago | 
science.org | Lianjie Miao |Nikos Koundouros |Henry Farrell |Alison Gopnik
Information & AuthorsPublished In ScienceVolume 387 | Issue 673914 March 2025Article versionsSubmission historyPublished in print: 14 March 2025PermissionsRequest permissions for this article. AcknowledgmentsAll authors contributed equally to this work. J.E. began a visiting researcher affiliation with Google after this manuscript was submitted.
-
2 months ago | 
unpopularfront.news | John Ganz |Max Read |Henry Farrell |Brad DeLong
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. I’m going to comment briefly on the disgraceful Trump-Zelensky Oval Office scene, but first…In case you missed it, and I hosted political scientist on our intermittent podcast.—Speaking of podcasts, I’m very excited that next week I’ll be the first guest on Inflection Point, the relaunched Berkeley Political Economy podcast with economist and sociologist Dylan J. Riley.
-
2 months ago | 
bloomberg.com | Henry Farrell
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.
-
2 months ago | 
almendron.com | Henry Farrell
Durante las dos últimas décadas, Estados Unidos ha generado un arsenal sin precedentes de herramientas de seguridad económica que han anclado la política exterior estadounidense. Los gobiernos republicanos y demócratas desarrollaron en conjunto una visión compartida del mundo y de la mejor manera de defender los intereses de Estados Unidos.
