On a gloomy July evening, Dean Ball is appraising the political theory shelf in the basement of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore. It’s the end of his second day at OpenAI, and he’s arrived straight from orientation in a cashmere zip-up hoodie, carrying a company-issued tote bag. He pulls a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Pure Theory of Capital” from the shelf, notes how rare it is to see it in the wild, and flips through its pages. It’s a fitting choice.
Ball has landed in a distinctly Hayekian role at OpenAI. The 20th century economist, as Ball recounts to me, argued that political change begins not at the ballot box but among…
