The Collapse of Venezuela documents Venezuela’s economic implosion as politicians adopted strategies that severely harmed the economy in their struggle for power. Between 2012 and 2020, Venezuela suffered the largest economic contraction ever documented outside of wartime. This collapse was caused not just by the failure of an economic model but also the deeper failure of its political system to manage the conflicts inherent to a polarized society. The Collapse of Venezuela argues that when the stakes of power are high, politicians have an incentive to adopt political strategies that directly harm the economy. Author Francisco Rodríguez describes these scorched earth strategies and shows how politicians used these methods to target the Venezuelan economy in their fight for power. Ultimately, the conflicting sides have trapped the economy in a catastrophic stalemate that has destroyed the country’s living standards and turned the economy into a political battlefield. By charting Venezuela’s experience with scorched earth politics, Rodríguez reveals an essential cautionary tale for other democracies around the globe. “ The Collapse of Venezuela is the definitive account of the collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Rodríguez provides not only a page-turning play-by-play of the economic policy decisions that destroyed more than 70 percent of Venezuela’s GDP but also a startling new theory of economically destructive political conflict.” ―Dorothy Kronick, University of California, Berkeley "In charting the catastrophic economic collapse of his native Venezuela, Rodríguez, a political economist, combines technical expertise with insider insights from his years in public service." ― Foreign Affairs "A novel and insightful account of one of the most remarkable economic and political breakdowns in recent history. . . . Rodriguez’s book, which includes a blueprint for major institutional reforms, is essential reading as the U.S. steps up its efforts to oust the Maduro regime, with little apparent planning for what might come next." ― Responsible Statecraft Francisco Rodríguez is the Rice Family Professor of the Practice of International and Public Affairs at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is the co-editor of Venezuela before Chávez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse. The idea that politicians may pursue inefficient policies to strengthen their chance to stay in power has a long history. The book of Isaiah describes the rulers of Judah as corrupt “companions of thieves” who “do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them” (Isaiah 1:1-31). In the first century BC, the Roman Tribune Clodius passed a law promising a free corn dole to all male citizens; the law led to the draining of the Roman treasury but allowed Clodius to reduce the power of magistrates and send his rival Cicero into exile (Tatum 1999; Watts 2018, p. 209). Holy Roman Empire princes prepared for the Thirty Years’ War by paying for mercenaries with debased currency, throwing early seventeenth-century Europe into a competitive hyperinflation (Kindleberger 1991). The view that governments should be viewed not as altruistic social planners but as spaces where political actors pursue their own self-interest, leading to policy decisions which are often neither economically optimal nor representative of the popular will, was brought into mainstream neoclassical economics through the contributions of the Virginia school of public choice (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Olson 1965; Niskanen 1971). Much of the work in this tradition saw electoral politics as inextricably linked with suboptimal economic outcomes, positing that politicians would systematically try to fool voters or use the political system as a smokescreen to deviate resources to special interests (Tullock 1983; Tollison 1988; Magee, Brock and Young 1989). An alternate vision, associated with the University of Chicago economics department, viewed political competition as leading to convergence to efficient outcomes (Stigler 1971; Becker 1976). Many contributions of the public choice school were based on the premise that voters were irrational and that politicians could systematically deceive them. For example, the earliest political business cycle models argued that the government would have an incentive to pursue expansionary policies by exploiting a short-run Philips curve to generate economic expansions ahead of elections (Nordhaus 1975). In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars working in the rational-choice tradition explored ways to make the findings of systematic politically induced policy distortions consistent with the hypothesis of voter rationality. Signaling models were used to show that under asymmetric information, rational voters could be tricked into believing that some policymakers were more competent than they actually were. For example, Rogoff and Siebert (1988) showed that policymakers could use inflatio