Catch Up With Facebook Founder Chris Hughes Today at 5pm

We'll discuss his new book MarketCrafters and much else

Today at 5pm ET I will do a live video chat with economist Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook.

If you’ve watched The Social Network you’ll recall that Chris was the Harvard classmate who went with Mark Zuckerberg to Palo Alto during summer break in 2004 - but, unlike Zuckerberg he went back to Harvard and finished his degree before rejoining the company for a year or so until 2007.

In 2019 he wrote an oped for the New York Times advocating for the company’s break up and government regulation of its content.

I haven’t seen Chris in a long time. I met him in New York, during the four year period in which he owned The New Republic magazine from 2012-2016 and I remember meeting his equally charming husband, the political activist Sean Eldridge.

But I can’t recall when we last chatted.

So, I am excited to catch up with him later this afternoon and talk with him about his new book “Marketcrafters: The 100-year Struggle to Shape the American Economy” which delves into the lives of a handful of key people who have tried - not always successfully - to merge the economic interests of the state and private sector.

Chris’s argument is that it would be the benefit of all if government and private enterprise could be better blended. (I’m sure he will quibble with my wording, but that’s my take).

He has written the book in an remarkably engaging and non-jargony way: for example, one of the protagonists, Bill Martin, who became the ninth chair of the Federal Reserve, is introduced to us as a religious teenager in the middle of a tennis tournament when he’s faced with a dilemma: he needs to play the Finals on a Sunday. Should he play or not?

Martin’s teenage decision sets up the motif for what’s to come in his professional life (during which, he plays tennis every day for an hour at lunch time).

There’s also a fascinating chapter on Katherine Ellickson the woman who fought - in vain, as it turned out - to give the United States a National Health Service.

As I read her story, for the first time I understood why we have the nonsensical smorgasbord that is the American Healthcare industry.

I haven’t yet read the chapter on controversial former FTC commissioner Lina Khan, but I will have done so by the time I chat with Chris.

So, join me on the substack app to hear more at 5pm!