Is Silicon Valley Conservative?

What are the political beliefs of Silicon Valley elites? It's an interesting question, and definitely one worth asking, since tech companies have never been more powerful. I've wanted to see a thorough analysis of the political leanings of technologists for quite some time, but unfortunately most of what has been published is overwhelmingly focused on individual people, companies, and issues. No one has really zoomed out, so that's what I want to do today. Hi, I'm John Coogan, and this is my analysis of the political leanings of Silicon Valley. I've been wanting to make a video about the intersection of technology and politics for quite a while now, but I was pushed off the fence a few weeks ago when I read the New York Times piece on Scott Alexander and his blog, Slate Star Codex. For those of you who don't know, Scott Alexander has been an influential blogger in Silicon Valley for the last eight years. He covers topics like public policy, psychology, culture, and many more from a rationalist perspective, and I've run into his post while surfing hacker news plenty of times. Everything he writes is very well researched and generally doesn't spark much controversy, so I found it odd that the New York Times would try and paint him as someone who helps spread extremist views within the tech world. Most of the arguments laid out in the Times piece focus on taking quotes out of context, guilt by association with or both, and fortunately, Scott Alexander has already published a complete rebuttal of each point. You can go read it on his new substack, which I've linked below. I'm not going to cover each claim made by the New York Times in detail, since there has already been significant coverage and I think Scott does a good job of defending himself. Instead, I'd like to get to the bigger question here Is political extremism spreading within Silicon Valley? On the one hand, the New York Times and other media outlets tend to argue that Internet communities allow fringe ideologies to proliferate rapidly due to unprecedented reach and limited censorship. And on the other hand, most Silicon Valley types tend to argue that free speech is a fundamental right and that good ideas will win out over bad ideas when they collide online. But this New York Times article is different from the usual calls for harsher content moderation on platforms like YouTube and Twitter, because we are now talking about the ideas of a single individual, Scott Alexander, and the article argues that his influence is primarily over Silicon Valley elites. Cade Metz, the author of the New York Times article, includes a quote by a researcher who says a community like Slate Star Codex gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views. So that is the question I'm going to try and answer. Are Silicon Valley elites becoming more politically extreme? How can we answer this question? Well, in the New York Times piece, one of the sources says that the author should somehow prove statistically which side is right. Fortunately, there is plenty of data available about the political leanings of Silicon Valley elites, so that shouldn't be too hard to do. The New York Times claims that Scott Alexander is platforming right wing views and thereby shifting the opinions of tech leaders who read Slate Star Codex. But all donations to political campaigns are public information in the United States, so let's look at where Silicon Valley elites put their money in order to statistically answer this question. In order to compile a comprehensive data set, I first looked at the Forbes Midas list, which ranks top venture capitalists each year. Even though VCs aren't the only power brokers in Silicon Valley, they serve as a great sample since they sit on boards of most tech companies and act as mentors to up and coming founders. The New York Times article also cites mostly VCs when describing the influence that Slate Star Codex has had on the tech industry, so I think it's a reasonable place to start. I cross referenced every VC firm that is mentioned on the Midas list with the United States Federal Election Commission database of political donations to come up with a little over 11,000 total donations across 31 prominent venture capital firms. After cleaning up the data using some python code, I started slicing the data across time, political party and firm to see what's actually going on politically in Silicon Valley. Here's what I found. First, donations have increased significantly over the past 20 years. In 2001, these top VC firms donated just $120,000 across all political parties, but in 2020, that number grew to nearly $24 million. Now, political donations have grown outside of Silicon Valley during that period as well, but VC donations have outpaced national averages significantly. This is most likely driven by the fact that VCs have more money than ever and politics increasingly plays a role in venture back startup success. Just look at all the regulatory hurdles that Uber dealt with. My second finding was that donations to Democratic candidates and political action committees outpaced Republican focused donations by a factor of 2 to 1. VCs sent over $42 million to Democrats in the last 20 years versus just 20 million to Republicans over the same period. This does swing wildly from year to year though, with Republican donations dwarfing democratic donations in 2012 and 2015. Looking at the last three years though, we can see that Silicon Valley appears to have become more liberal, with VCs sending more than four times as much money to Democrats than Republicans. Third, it can be really helpful to look at political donations by individual VC firm since the Silicon Valley tech community is not a monolith. Firms like founders fund and 8VC consistently support Republican candidates, while Greylock and Bessemer have consistently supported Democratic candidates. If we look at the percentage of total donation dollars that go to Republicans, we can see how Silicon Valley firms spread across the political spectrum. And each firm is not a monolith either. Sequoia is notable in that two of their highest profile partners are split politically. Doug Leone is a major Republican donor, while Mike Moritz consistently supports the Democrats. This actually goes a layer deeper as well, with some individual investors being split politically and donating to both sides depending on the candidate. As I mentioned in a previous video, Chamath Palihapitiya has donated to both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. Diving deeper into firm specific political donations, if we create a scatter plot where the x axis represents the magnitude of donations to Democratic causes and the Y axis represents Republican donations, we can see which firms are the most politically active as well as the most ideologically homogenous. In this graph, the size of each bubble determines the absolute size of all the donations made by members of the firm over the past 20 years. The center diagonal line represents a perfect 5050 split of donations between Democrats and Republicans. So you can clearly see that Founders Fund and Bessemer are more consistent in their political giving than benchmark in Andreessen Horowitz, which spend relatively evenly across the political landscape. As with the previous charts, you can see here that the overall trend of political giving in Silicon Valley leans Democratic, with most of the funds residing below the politically central line. Looking at this data, I don't feel like it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is leaning right wing. If anything, as the last few years of donations show, VCs are supporting Democrats more fervently than ever. So why is the New York Times worried about fringe political thinking taking hold in Silicon Valley? Well, I think it comes down to specific political issues more than support for one particular political party. Even though Silicon Valley tends to lean blue, there are a few popular political ideas that stand apart from the typical Democratic party line. In 2017, a team of researchers at Stanford published an analysis of political opinions that were widely held in Silicon Valley. They based their research on a survey conducted with 600 technology company leaders and founders who all submitted anonymous responses voluntarily. The Research showed a few interesting things about where Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party diverge ideologically. First, they asked everyone whether they agreed with the statement I would like to live in a society where the government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could. This was meant to serve as a distillation of libertarianism, and to many people's surprise, these technology founders were far less likely to agree with this statement than average Democrats. If you boil down the role of government to just regulation of industry and redistribution of wealth, you can visualize four potential political structures in a two by two matrix. Most Democratic donors believe that the government should both regulate and redistribute, whereas Republican donors are generally anti regulation and anti redistribution. The technologists surveyed in this study were unique in that they overwhelmingly supported a government that would tax the wealthy to fund social programs but not tightly regulate business. This is a unique position that disproves the idea that Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly libertarian, and it also explains why Andrew Yang's proposal of universal basic income has become so popular. The final interesting takeaway from the Stanford research relates to social issues. When polled about social issues like same sex marriage, abortion, gun control, and the death penalty, technology entrepreneurs were overwhelmingly liberal. And this brings me back to Scott Alexander and the New York Times. Scott has addressed every accusation of racism and sexism, but even if you don't believe his rebuttals, the data about what the tech elite believe and how they spend their money seems incontrovertible to me. Even if Slate star Codex was some sort of undercover attempt to radicalize Silicon Valley towards right wing ideologies, it doesn't seem to be having that effect whatsoever. So what's really going on here? I think the answer is pretty simple actually. For profit news is not the same as academic research. The goal is to tell an interesting story, one that people will read, share and talk about, and this article achieved those goals. I personally don't think the portrayal of Scott Alexander is particularly accurate, but it sure does make for dramatic reading. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters. There is still some great reporting that comes from the New York Times, and I generally like that they ask hard questions. I just think that they got this one wrong. But ultimately it's not that big of a deal. Scott's blog will continue to be widely read and his readership might actually grow from all the attention. As an entrepreneur, you need to understand that the tech press tends to move in cycles. At the start, you'll be the hero of every story until you grow big enough to become a threat, at which point the press will shift towards skepticism, asking questions like is this company too big? After a long wave of negative press, there is an opportunity for rebirth and the cycle can begin again. It's important not to focus too much on what the press is saying about you. Instead, focus on growing your company, making your users happy, and keeping an even keel. So in summary, the technology industry is not on the verge of becoming massively right wing, at least not anytime soon. The press may benefit from telling that story, and it is a worthwhile question to ask, but I don't think Scott Alexander is the right person to single out to drive that narrative. No media coverage can make a bad company succeed or a good company fail. So just focus on building a great product. But let me know what you think. If you've read Slate Star Codex, leave me a comment with your opinion, and if you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to the channel. And as always, thanks for watching.