Henry Farrell

@himself

Professor of democracy and international affairs. and newsletter at . Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin).

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Henry Farrell@himself· 9d

Irish summers how are ya

Henry Farrell@himself· 12d

Chris Hayes was good on this in a conversation with Ezra Klein before Mamdani was elected - www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o... - the whole discussion is good on the experimentation/attention dynamic.

I think it’s the most important question in some ways. One thing I would say is, I like experimentation and new ideas.

When he was asked about the public groceries — I think it’s in “The Bulwark Podcast” — he says: We’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work, c’est la vie.

I love that answer. Politicians never give that answer. The person who really most embodied that spirit is F.D.R.

If you go back and read about the first hundred days, they’re just trying a lot. We now think about F.D.R. as this colossus who remade the relationship between the citizen and the federal government. A lot of that stuff did not work — like, fully failed. A lot of the interventions failed.

They did a lot of clunky stuff. It was a totally different time. He had these enormous mandates, and it was a crisis.

I like the idea of experimentation and these ideas coming from outside of the consensus around sensible policy. The test for it is: Can you deliver?

Henry Farrell@himself· 13d

Randall Jarrell - "I had thought a good motto for critics might be what the Persians taught their children: to shoot the bow and speak the truth; but perhaps a better one would be Cordelia's love and be silent." (nb I quite liked the movie)

Henry Farrell@himself· 13d

point. counterpoint.

Henry Farrell@himself· 24d

assets.joelgustafson.com/2025-10-29/T...

The labyrinth is made so that whoever enters it gets lost, so
they wander. But at the same time it implies a call to the
visitor to reproduce the plan according to which it is built,
and thus solve the confusion. If they succeed, they will have
destroyed the labyrinth: for whoever has unraveled it, there is
no longer a labyrinth.

Henry Farrell@himself· 25d

on second thoughts, could have been phrased better

Henry Farrell@himself· 29d

www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-median...

Henry Farrell@himself· Jul 10

www.programmablemutter.com/p/patrick-ob...

Most importantly, he believes that knowing one’s men, as individuals and as a group, is crucial to proper command. Some people who read O’Brian reasonably complain about the detailed description of ship’s rigging and equipment. Far fewer note the nearly equally omnipresent philosophical discussions and asides, which frequently counterpose both Aubrey and Maturin’s lively attention to the individual to Whiggish abstractions. The abominable banker Mr. Ellis is naturally a friend of Jeremy Bentham, whom he lauds as “the gentleman that wrote the Defense of Usury (it deserved to be printed in gold) [and] had invented a whipping machine.”

Bentham’s whipping machine would certainly be more efficient than the cat’o’ninetails but efficiency is not the summum bonum. When Jack has his men punished in an earlier scene, he reproves a midshipman for not being properly dressed for the occasion: “these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony - all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.”

Henry Farrell@himself· Jul 7

The weirdness and endemic dishonesty of this saga led me to break with a large chunk of the post-Snowden left that I used to be friendly with. crookedtimber.org/2023/06/08/d...

$The Intercept has been a notoriously fractious organization, with people leaving in angry huffs, being forced to leave, newsroom leaks and the like. I can understand why they don’t want more drama. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s an article whose fundamental flaws have caused specific hurt and had wide repercussions for American media and politics. Fixing fuck-ups like this is Journalism Ethics 101. And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better. That’s an argument that I strongly disagree with, but it is not an inherently stupid argument. What is stupid – and worse than stupid – is the conspiratorial logic they use to defend it, patching together out-of-context quotes, breathless rhetoric, and disconnected factoids to suggest by sheer force of volume that There Is Something Wicked Going On. A healthy distrust of the state has mutated into a creepy wake-up-sheeple paranoia. The Intercept is still publishing good journalism (e.g.). But this is a style of writing that it needs to cut off at the roots.$

Henry Farrell@himself· Jun 24

background information

Henry Farrell@himself· Jun 24

I don't want to poke fun at the sincerely held beliefs of probably very nice people who I would like if I ever met them but ... substack.com/home/post/p-...

“If we’re going to die,” said Ben Woden, operations manager at Pivotal Research, a fellowship program for aspiring AI researchers, “I would really, really prefer to die fighting.” He then clarified that by “fighting” he meant continuing to work at his job as an operations manager for an AI safety nonprofit, not bombing a data center.

Henry Farrell@himself· Jun 14

sfstandard.com/2026/06/13/b...

At one point, there were so many organizations fundraising off the threat of the Billionaire Tax Act that two donors — Ritankar Das of Titan Holdings and Genevieve Jurvetson — tried to organize a Zoom call to get them all in one place. The idea, according to someone with knowledge of the plans, was for donors to appear with their screens blacked out to maintain privacy while representatives for each organization took turns pitching their visions — like an episode of “Shark Tank” in the dark. The idea was eventually scrapped over fear that details would leak to the press, the source said.

Henry Farrell@himself· Jun 10

On a somewhat related topic, have a somewhat related co-authored piece coming out real soon.

Henry Farrell@himself· May 25

Here's the full quote (too big to be alt-texted)

Henry Farrell@himself· May 14

"But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half-alive and the people were half-dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping: the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx's description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all. Emil gave a hop and shuffle in the dust." -- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, Graywolf Press, 2010: 66-67.

Henry Farrell@himself· May 8

Henry Farrell@himself· May 7

The Gellner Solution

Henry Farrell@himself· May 3

It's really good. We were enormously lucky with the cover (and with the UK too, which is very different: reminds me a little of my ancient UK edition of Neuromancer back from when I was a teenager)

Henry Farrell@himself· May 3

seen and raised

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 30

from the protest on the day of the abortion ruling. She did indeed.

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 29

"Only 338 people have submitted requests for Donald Trump’s $1mn Gold Card visa, . ... When the scheme was announced, Lutnick said it would replace the EB-5 visa ... . He later said 200,000 visas could net $1tn for the Treasury department." www.ft.com/content/30f6...

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 25

direct.mit.edu/isec/article...

They highlight the importance of enduring, but not immutable network structures. States are locked into existing network structures only up to that point where the costs of remaining in them are lower than the benefits: should this change, one may see transitions to new arrangements.

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 17

if i were a politician, i'd prefer the trail of slime headline meself.

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 15

The closing para of this FT piece on the Santacon scam arrest is enjoyably dry. www.ft.com/content/7365...

The New York SantaCon website describes the event as a “nonsensical Santa Claus convention” to “spread absurdist joy” and urges participants not to vomit, litter, fight, urinate on the street, climb on cars or deface property.

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 14

Comrades, the Great Convergence foreseen in the Yglesias-Cowen Symposium Issue of Monthly Review (Greek) that I brokered nearly twenty years ago has at last begun to reveal itself.

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 13

The Raw Story read-this-next sidebar for that link leaves no doubts about the business model they are optimizing on

Henry Farrell@himself· Apr 1

Boswell's Life of Johnson

Henry Farrell@himself· Mar 31

Worth noting that Hanania had a very short career as aspiring political science academic before becoming a commentator. Also FWIW, my own take from 2020 on the areas where political scientists are on average better than economists though not as good as they should be. fivebooks.com/best-books/p...

Economists tend to be more mathematically and econometrically sophisticated than political scientists, but what political scientists tend to be better at than economists (albeit not all economists; there are some who are very good at this) is understanding that some problems are irreducibly political. This is not a world in which we are always going to be able to get to first-best solutions or even second-best solutions. This is a world in which people are often going to disagree, radically, on what the first-best solutions and what the second-best solutions ought to be. Whether we like it or not, we all find ourselves stuck with other people who not only have different material goals, but also very different value systems.

Here we might think about how these different value systems, these different perspectives, can offer valuable information about how to solve broader problems. And so political science, in an ideal sense, could start thinking about systems that can harness these quite fundamental and irreducible disagreements among human beings and apply them to social and political problems that might otherwise be pretty intractable. Not in a way that points towards some kind of optimum, not in a way that will ever point toward some kind of a utopia, but instead in a way that messily—but nonetheless usefully—conducts political behavior in ways that are both conducive towards social peace and political peace. This would be more like engineering design than most political scientists are comfortable with, albeit less like it than the work of economists. We would end up somewhere in Simon’s science of design, with varying degrees of quantitative sophistication across different political scientists (I myself am not at all sophisticated).

Henry Farrell@himself· Mar 30

www.usnews.com/news/blogs/w...