My name is Max Constantine Corkan Plithides, and I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and an IGCC predoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). I received my M.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 2021 and my B.A. in Economics from Trinity University.

My current dissertation and book project draws on economic theories of production and specialization to develop a new Power Production Theory (PPT) of how states fight wars. PPT holds that because militaries derive from civilian economies everything from equipment and human resources (material factors) to cultural and organizational norms (non-material factors), the composition of a state's civilian economic assets significantly conditions its overall ability to generate martial power. My dissertation evidences this perspective using archival documents, original historical datasets, ongoing Ukraine war data, machine learning techniques, iterative break date detection algorithms, and econometric models.