A deeper look at Silicon Valley’s long-term politics

[Commentary] To shed light on the motivations of the tech elite, I and my co-authors at Stanford Graduate School of Business, David Broockman and Neil Malhotra, released the findings from a political survey of over 600 tech company founders. Our results revealed a group that was largely supportive of Democrats and redistribution through higher taxation. That is, they seemed to defy the stereotype of hyper-libertarian big business and the results were received with considerable confusion.

In this post, I’d like to show how these seemingly contradictory beliefs are unified (based on the data). All of the policies supported by the Valley make a lot more sense in the context of their core belief: a radical optimism in the future. “I tend to believe that most Silicon Valley people are very much long-term optimists,” said LinkedIn founder and Hillary Clinton supporter Reid Hoffman. “Could we have a bad 20 years? Absolutely. But if you’re working towards progress, your future will be better than your present.”

[Gregory Ferenstein is the editor of The Ferenstein Wire]