Victor Menaldo

Political economy is the study of collective action — through markets, states, civil society, and culture.

My work shows how people cooperate, coordinate, and signal their way to status, opportunity, and prosperity — and why societies that open those paths to anyone, rather than rationing them by birth, faith, or connections, are rare and hard to keep.

Victor Menaldo is a professor of political science at the University of Washington, the author of History’s Most Revolutionary Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and at work on a book about the political economy of liberalism.

I.The Newsletter

No Rush on Things That Matter

Essays on political economy — how individuals govern, invest, innovate, and remain free when they depend on others who may not necessarily like being governed, lack the patience to invest, fear the changes wrought by new ideas, and may not value freedom for freedom’s sake. What does all this mean in practice? That AI is best understood as the newest entry in humanity’s long lineage of tools for modeling reality — and that statistics, not AI, remains the only tool that knows how far to trust itself. That liberal majorities can lose to vocal minorities they outnumber ten to one, because liberalism is a coordination game that depends on a society seeing itself accurately. That well-meant policy — a retroactive ban on non-compete clauses, a tax aimed at millionaires — often breaks more than it fixes, and that the breakage is usually knowable in advance. Essays are posted whole, when they are ready — no schedule, no chasing the news cycle. The name promises a more deliberate tempo in our runaway train of a changing world.

  • speechcooperation within earshot
  • writingobligations that outlive memory
  • numberexchange between strangers
  • statisticsrisk pooled across millions
  • computingprediction made industrial
  • internetmatching and reputation at planetary scale
  • aiprediction made free — verification made precious

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II.Forthcoming · Cambridge University Press

History’s Most Revolutionary Innovation

In History’s Most Revolutionary Innovation, I show that America’s AI dominance was not an accident of entrepreneurial culture or free markets. It was engineered — through four decades of bipartisan reforms to intellectual property, antitrust, telecommunications, and trade policy that quietly built the legal and economic scaffolding the digital economy required.

Situating AI within the lineage of previous general purpose technologies like steam engines, electricity, and the microchip, and tracing its full arc from semiconductors to smartphones to large language models, I show how a handful of dominant firms simultaneously captured outsized returns and spread innovation across global supply chains — and ask what happens now that the US, China, and the EU are retreating into competing, gated technology regimes.

The result is the first comprehensive account of where AI came from, why its benefits have been uneven, and what will determine whether the AI revolution lifts living standards.

Cambridge University Press · 2026 · Pre-order from CUP
III.Earlier books · Cambridge University Press

Earlier Books

IV.In progress

The Political Economy of Liberalism

Why do the world’s wealthiest, most technologically advanced societies keep producing illiberal movements — Trumpism, European nationalism, progressive identitarianism — when modernization theory says they shouldn’t? The book’s answer: liberalism and illiberalism are not opposing value systems but competing solutions to the same menu of collective action problems every society must solve. The liberal solutions are information-intensive and scale only where abundance is broadly accessible; where access thins, even amid plenty, the illiberal package becomes the rational fallback — on the left and the right alike.

Picture the same life lived twice. In the first, a young woman in a village marries the neighbor’s son her parents chose — the families know each other’s land, debts, and reputations three generations back. When fever ruins her husband’s harvest, the congregation feeds them, because the family is in good standing: they tithe, they conform, they showed up to raise the neighbor’s barn. The common pasture is rationed by gossip — everyone knows whose goats overgrazed — and the church roof gets built because everyone can see who didn’t help. Strangers are met with suspicion and dealt with through a cousin who can vouch. Every problem on the menu is solved. The solutions run on eyes and memory; the price is conformity; and the boundary of cooperation is the edge of the parish.

In the second life, she meets her husband among ten thousand strangers — a university, an app — and chooses. Illness and a layoff are covered by paycheck withholding: actuarial pooling across millions she will never meet, eligibility a matter of rules rather than piety. The water she draws is metered and billed; the fishery her dinner came from is governed by permits and courts, not shame. She joins associations by paying dues and leaves them without exile. She hands her credit card to a barista she has never seen and rents from a landlord who trusted a score compiled by strangers about strangers. Every step runs on information at scale — censuses, actuarial tables, credit bureaus, contracts — and on a quiet bet: that millions of others will keep playing by the same rules tomorrow. That bet is the liberal equilibrium. It needs scale, it needs records, and it holds only while everyone believes it holds.

It is a sequel to the AI book in the strict sense. The liberal solutions run on humanity’s tools for modeling the world — no statistics, no welfare state; no writing, no contract law — and the book closes with a chapter on AI and liberalism: the first tool that makes the liberal solutions cheaper across the board while degrading the thing the liberal equilibrium most depends on, a society’s ability to see itself accurately. Liberal institutions — a free press, peer review, independent courts and audits — are a civilization’s error bars, and AI raises the premium on every one of them.

V.Selected writing

Op-eds

VI.Contact

Professor of Political Science, University of Washington · Co-founder, UW Political Economy Forum · vmenaldo@uw.edu