The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

“Caro's biography of Robert Moses is on this list because it shows how infrastructure, regulation, and institutional power actually accumulate and calcify over decades. Andreessen has cited it as essential context for understanding why American cities stopped being able to build things — and why the regulatory environment startups face is the product of deliberate political choices.”

“Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses is central to how Collison thinks about power and institutional inertia. Moses built more of 20th-century New York than any elected official ever did — the book is about what that kind of concentrated leverage looks like in practice, for better and worse.”