Why subscribe?

Political economy is the study of collective action — through markets, states, civil society, and culture. These are essays about how individuals govern, invest, innovate, and remain free when they depend on others who may not 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 that 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 often breaks more than it fixes — and that the breakage is usually knowable in advance.

Who’s Writing?

I’m 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 (scroll down a bit for a summary). Summaries of my books and ongoing projections and full versions of my op-eds live at victormenaldo.com.

What You’ll Get

Free. New essays arrive when they’re finished — and not before. No schedule, no chasing the news cycle, no paywall, no pledges. The name promises a more deliberate tempo in our runaway train of a changing world. Unsubscribe anytime.