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WASHINGTON, DC—Industrial policy is back, and with a vengeance. After decades of preaching neoliberalism, Western policymakers and intellectuals have rediscovered the role of the state in economic development. Even the World Bank has jumped on the bandwagon, conceding that its old advice now has the “practical value of a floppy disk,” and that every country should make industrial policy part of its national toolkit.

But swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other is not the same as thinking anew. Much of the hype over industrial policy misses a new reality: today, simultaneous disruptions—AI, deglobalization, climate shocks, and geopolitical frictions—make it harder for policymakers to know which winner to bet on.

In the 20th century, the playbook for late industrializing countries demanded disciplined execution, but at least it was clear: build infrastructure, attract factories, manufacture for export, and climb the value chain. Today, the path is far less obvious. Moreover, disruptive innovation, by definition, cannot be predicted. By the time policymakers realize which technologies truly matter (such as semiconductors), the train may already have left the station.

Selecting winners is even more difficult among advanced Western economies, because their policy reflects not only the pursuit of competitiveness, but also security concerns. Once the logic of national security takes hold, almost everything can be declared “critical” or “strategic”—be it semiconductors, electric vehicles, fertilizer, masks, baby formula, painkillers, or even lumber.

The debate is not whether governments should intervene—most already do. Instead, the real question is: what can governments do when they do not know in advance what will work?

One answer from the World Bank and others is to adapt and experiment. But who could disagree with that? Left unsaid is how exactly governments should enable adaptation.

Ten years ago, in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, I introduced the concept of “directed improvisation.” Governments that rely on this approach do not dictate outcomes or pick winners in advance. Instead, they act more like the director of an improvised play, or like the programmer of a self-generating computer game. Their job is to create the conditions for bottom-up, spontaneous creation and shape a variety of possibilities by drawing boundaries, defining and rewarding success, and scaling up what works.

My premise is that uncertainty—all the unknown possibilities, both good and bad—is distinct from risk, meaning negative outcomes whose probability of occurrence can be calculated and controlled. Under uncertainty, preselecting outcomes is not only futile but potentially counterproductive, since it may lead governments to miss opportunities that defy their initial expectations. Instead of controlling, governments must exercise influence.

One way to do that is through what I call adaptive policy communication. When faced with a novel challenge, governments can initially issue grey (ambiguous) signals that neither endorse nor prohibit activity. Then, when pilots prove effective, they can endorse them explicitly, while drawing red lines to prevent intolerable risks.

This mechanism can be systematically measured. In a recent study, my co-authors and I used large language models to classify Chinese central policy directives and track how signals have evolved over time and across policy domains. What we found undercuts the stereotype of China as the Darth Vader of industrial policy—an omnipresent state that thinks in decades, picks winners, pours in subsidies, and aims to dominate the world.

Consider e-commerce, a major engine of inclusive growth. China now has the world’s largest e-commerce industry, accounting for roughly 50% of global sales and generating an estimated 50-70 million jobs. E-commerce platforms accelerate the sales of countless retailers and manufacturers of consumer goods like lighters, lamps, and socks, none of which matter geopolitically, but all of which are indispensable to modern life—not least in America.

But was e-commerce one of the sectors targeted by the government’s Made in China 2025? The first central directive related to e-commerce was issued in 2000, when the State Council referred to “internet information services,” defined narrowly as providing information online and designing webpages for fees. Central planners did not foresee the rise of e-commerce.

Nor did the government take a hands-off approach. As the sector grew, the state took notice and adapted its strategy. In 2015, the State Council approved a request from the Zhejiang provincial government to build experimental zones for cross-border e-commerce, urging it to “support bold innovation” and “adjust according to the times.” In plain language, this was a green light to scale up an industry that had shown proof of concept, with local authorities lobbying the central government for support.

The lesson for other countries is not that they should copy China. It is that under uncertainty, the challenge for industrial policy is not simply picking winners but discovering them. And once they are discovered, it is essential to tailor support beyond the usual toolkit of tariffs and subsidies. Some of the most effective government support in e-commerce came from policies that encouraged traditional industries to integrate themselves into digital platforms.

China is not the only illustration. Who would have predicted that Nigeria would produce the world’s second-largest film industry by volume? Or that fashion, empowered by e-commerce, would become one of Africa’s fastest-growing creative industries?

More broadly, many vibrant, creative, digital sectors that are emerging from the bottom up in Africa defy the old industrial-policy vision of foreign-invested factories and industrial parks. Yet through my own research in Nigeria, I found that entrepreneurs in these emerging sectors face obstacles when they seek support to scale up operations. Banks hesitate to lend to those without physical collateral, and technocrats overlook businesses that do not appear “strategic.”

In the 21st century, uncertainty—unknown possibilities—is not a bug, but a feature. Designing industrial policy under such conditions requires more than pivoting away from neoliberalism. It demands a new way of thinking that I call AIM (adaptive, inclusive, moral) political economy.

AIM challenges a core assumption of top-down planning: that policymakers know the answers in advance. Increasingly, they do not. But this does not mean helplessness. It means crafting meta-institutions that enable discovery and innovation—which often emerge unexpectedly.

Reprinted from . Read the original article here.

Learn More

• Read Yuen’s introductory essay on AIM — Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy at Oxford Development Studies

• Read “Ambiguity and Clarity in China’s Adaptive Policy Communication” (2023) open access at The China Quarterly

• Read “CAPC-CG,” an empirical extension of the above using LLM annotation, accepted at ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics) 2026

Imagine managing living forests as if they were static rows of toasters. If that sounds absurd, realize that this is how technocrats and social scientists often approach political economy: mistaking the complex for the complicated.

In this interview with Princeton University’s World Politics, Yuen Yuen Ang explains why distinguishing between “complex” and “complicated” matters for political economy—and why we must also confront how power and normative biases shape knowledge production.

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Emily Babson in Conversation with Yuen Yuen Ang: “Complex Doesn’t Mean Complicated—and Why It Matters,” World Politics (Princeton University), February 24, 2026

What can social scientists learn from fractals—“the jagged convoluted form of a rambling river”?

In the 75^th Anniversary issue of World Politics, Yuen Yuen Ang, Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, speaks with executive editor Emily Babson, on why we need an adaptive, reflexive turn in political economy.

“Given the many upended norms we’re facing today, how can we continue with the worldview of the past—thinking in machine mode and assuming that progress means looking like an idealized West? I don’t know how we can continue that,” Ang implored.

World Politics: Your article introduces adaptive political economy. Tell us about it.

Ang: Adaptive political economy (APE) is a paradigm that studies political economies as complex adaptive systems, rather than as complicated objects. I begin by making a basic ontological distinction: complex does not mean complicated (ontology are inquiries about the nature of matter and their classification). In common and academic language, these two words are conflated, with “complex” often connoting messiness. This is a mechanical mindset applied to non-mechanical realities.

Complicated means objects made up of separate parts that do not adapt or change over time, like a toaster. Complex, by contrast, are systems comprised of elements that constantly adapt to one another, like trees. Complexity has hidden orders; it is not chaos. APE is a paradigm aimed at developing concepts and methods to reveal and map out these orders, rather than simplifying them away.

World Politics: Why do you call APE a paradigm, not a theory or framework?

Ang: A theory is an explanation for a particular problem, whereas a framework is a static checklist. A paradigm, on the other hand, is a generative worldview—a way of studying the world based on core assumptions about the nature of humans and societies. As the 2019 Nobelist Ester Duflo said literally, economists tend to “think in machine mode.” They treat political economies as machines; press the right button (the “root cause”) and you will get the desired outcome.

Yet in reality, political economies do not resemble machines, especially on big questions that matter such as modernization, wars, financial crashes and recovery. What Duflo described is not a theory or framework, but a paradigm—the industrial paradigm—reducing highly complex social problems to toaster-like things.

The industrial paradigm is flawed because it contradicts social reality. Modern social science was born in an age of mass industrialization. That context has a profound, invisible influence on our ontology. We lack basic concepts to recognize systems that are not like toasters. They are perceived as nuisances, complications that stand in the way of advancing “parsimonious” social science theories.

Thus, in APE, I begin by underscoring a classification error. It is an error to treat societies as complicated, because they are inherently complex, with mutually adaptive elements producing outcomes that may be influenced, but not controlled. Making this ontological distinction is the first step toward a paradigm shift, because if the subject (like development) is misclassified, more errors will follow.

World Politics: In articulating APE, you took inspiration from fractals. Can you tell us more about fractals, who discovered it, and why it matters for the political economy of development?

Ang: I was looking for a meta-analogy that could explain the ontological error commonly made in social science, and fractals stuck out to me. Social scientists emulate mathematics because it is the kind of universal Newtonian truth the profession aspires toward. But fractals opened a radically different kind of mathematics.

The pioneer was Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM engineer fascinated by what he called “rough shapes” found all over nature. Think clouds, waves, mountains, a crown of broccoli. These are not triangles, squares, or lines. So, are they messy? Classical mathematicians called them “monsters” because their existence defied Euclidean formulas.

Mandelbrot’s work on fractals showed that rough shapes have order, so precisely that they can be computationally simulated. However, he was recognized only in his old age, setting the record as the oldest tenured professor at Yale! By then, his work was revolutionizing multiple fields, from geometry and physics to medical treatments and graphic design. Why was it wide-reaching? Because fractals was not just a framework or theory; it was a paradigm—a different way of understanding shapes.

What that story tells us is, social science today is reminiscent of classical mathematics yesterday. As modern, urban humans, we are familiar with machines. We like straight lines, squares, boxes, and circles. We reduce complex social phenomenon to a pair of variables (dependent and independent) and linear causality because it gives us a false sense of simplicity and control. Complexity feels instinctively repulsive, like “monsters,” not because they are scary, but because our default mechanical mindset rejects them. And most of the time, we don’t even know that our default setting is mechanical.

World Politics: In your World Politics article, you demonstrated one application of APE—coevolutionary development—by drawing from your book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. You argued that “development is best understood as a three-step, coevolutionary process.” Could you walk us through how you arrived at this finding and mapped it out? Also, you mentioned that APE is actually not a new paradigm, but already a decade old. What do you mean?

Ang: APE is “new” in the sense that it challenges the conventional mechanical paradigm. But it was introduced a decade ago in my 2016 book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, with China as the primary demonstration case. In the World Politics article, I formally named this paradigm APE, with empirical excerpts from my book. As long as “China” appeared on the cover, the instinctive reading was “sui generis.” So, I had to remove China to reveal the paradigm that had always been there.

In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, I applied APE to explain China’s great transformation from the 1980s. It’s a classic complex process where everything everywhere is changing all at once. My classical training taught me to pin down a single cause and effect. How was that possible? I took one year reading all the important literature to find the answer to this question. One of them says growth first, good institutions come later. The second one says good institutions first, growth comes later. And the third one by 2024 Nobelists Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson says you must be lucky enough to have colonial legacies that endowed good institutions, then growth will come.

All three theories are stuck. They are either endogenous (the cause is also the outcome) or deterministic (the past determines the present). I came to the conclusion that the problem lies not with endogenous development, but with applying the mechanical paradigm to explain it. Linear theories cannot explain nonlinear realities, just as “plumbing” (another Duflo metaphor) cannot nurture gardens.

After collecting hundreds of pages of oral history in different parts of China, I mapped out many zigzag causal chains between the economy and institutions, including property rights, development strategies, and types of corruption. I applied the same method across historical cases: late medieval Europe, 19th-century United States, and post-1990s Nigeria. Then I asked: what is the common order across them?

In its simplest form, development is a sequence of three steps.

1. Harness normatively weak institutions to build new markets—more simply, “using what you have.”

2. Emerging markets stimulate and enable strong (modern) institutions.

3. Strong (modern) institutions preserve markets.

I make a crucial distinction between market-building vs. market-preserving. For any developing country such as China, the first step of development is “using what you have.” What looks weak, wrong, informal, or unorthodox can be turned into solutions. But of course, change doesn’t automatically happen. Indigenous actors must apply their creativity in “using what they have” to solve their problems. For that to happen, they must first overcome a mental block: the belief that they have nothing.

APE highlights one blind-spot: mechanical thinking—trying to stuff dynamic feedback loops between the economy and institutions into static boxes. But there is also a second blind-spot, a normative one: the assumption that market-supporting institutions are necessarily the kind found in an idealized America or Denmark, e.g., Weberian technocracy, rule of law, Western-style democracy.

Frankly, it is questionable if that list still describes America today. It doesn’t describe America when it was an emerging economy, which saw corruption and systemic exclusions. But canonical theories often scrub out this messy history and claim a universal package of “good institutions” that will lead poor countries to the end of history. Given today’s disruptions, it’s hard to continue with that myth.

That is why I emphasized, in the conclusion, that APE is only one pillar of a larger paradigm I propose: AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy. Inclusive means recognizing multiple development pathways, not one Western endpoint. Moral means recognizing the role of power and positionality in shaping canons. They are not neutral. Some factors are elevated while others are muted; Western cases are assumed to be universal, while non-Western cases are ghettoized.

Q: You also pointed to colonialism and its role in how we view the world, writing: “The modern world is not only a product of industrialization but also that of colonialism.” Another line: “Layered on top of an industrial logic is a colonial worldview that assumes that the best, growth-promoting institutions are those found in the West, and backward societies must catch up, converge, and become like Denmark.” You follow this with a quote from Edward Said, specifically from his book, Orientalism. What is the significance of Said’s work in your article?

Ang: My scholarly journey has been about unlearning what I was taught and then relearning. My dissertation was aligned with institutional economics and Chinese exceptionalism. But when I tried to turn it into my first book, I found myself unable to proceed. I knew I was confronting a complex reality, but my default mechanical setting couldn’t handle it. The conventional normative framing was “virtuous governance led to prosperity in the West, but China is an exception,” but I couldn’t agree with that. Instead, I found the two more similarly fraught than most people think. I didn’t see the meaning of publishing something I no longer believed in. So, I abandoned my dissertation and started again. That detour turned into How China Escaped the Poverty Trap in 2016, then China’s Gilded Age in 2020. That decision to redefine assumptions also prompted all the other projects I continue to work on today.

In recent dark times, it has become fashionable to talk about “moral political economy” as being nice and ethical, holding hands and flourishing together. I cited Edward Said as a source of inspiration for thinking about moral political economy from a different angle—grounded in social reality: awareness about the role of power and positionality in knowledge formation. As he reminded us, objectivity is noble, but “no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from … a class, a set of beliefs, a social position.” Revisiting Said’s words may stir discomfort, as it is customary to claim neutrality. That’s how you demonstrate rigor as a social scientist, declare that you are values free. But as political scientists, more so than any other profession, how could we believe that power has no effect on ideas?

The three elements that comprise AIM—adaptive, inclusive, moral—are inseparable, like light, water, and soil. You cannot practice complexity economics without decolonizing. You cannot truly decolonize until you demonstrate a different way of doing social science and not just critiquing it. You cannot be truly objective if you deny the sociological factors that shape how we think as social scientists.

After unlearning my previous settings, AIM is what I’ve relearned and been practicing for years. Now I am naming and sharing it. Thank you very much for this opportunity to share.

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To Learn More

• Read Yuen Yuen Ang’s full essay, “Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm,” published in World Politics

• How does Gen-Z apply concepts from APE and AIM? Read Polytunity: Gen-Z Series, a curation of essays by Ang’s students at Johns Hopkins.

Reprinted with permission from World Politics. Read the original post here.

With the demise of the old now a consensus, we’re revisiting Ang’s “Polytunity: The Future of Development,” published three months before 2026. Rejecting the fear-naming of polycrisis, this essay reframes the current moment as polytunity—a generational opening for deep transformation and true global inclusion in what has long been a structurally unequal world.

Polytunity is not opportunity-in-crisis vibes. It is not optimism, but realism—a recognition that systems change only becomes possible when the old order begins to rupture.

“Polytunity: The Future of Development,” The Ideas Letter, 4 September, 2025, by Yuen Yuen Ang.

Every September, world leaders gather in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. They come weighed down by climate disasters, widening inequality, democratic erosion, trade wars, and threats to multilateralism. They leave with heavier burdens than when they arrived.

We now have a fashionable word for this convergence of problems: polycrisis. Since the Columbia historian Adam Tooze popularized it at the World Economic Forum in 2023, it has become the apocalyptic buzzword of the decade. Tooze himself was disarmingly frank in admitting that he was only giving fear a name.

What the polycrisis concept says is: Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment. I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic. Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. That is what it might be called.

Therapy, maybe. Diagnosis, no. Solutions, zero. Yet “polycrisis” has caught on worldwide.

Why? Because it is comfortable. Polycrisis is a descriptor that the establishment can agree on without challenging itself. It abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear as natural convergences rather than the systemic outcomes of extractive and exclusionary orders. And it makes the concept appear global when in fact the voices, experiences, and priorities it reflects are overwhelmingly Eurocentric.

I see things differently. I call this moment a polytunity—a term I coined in 2024 to reframe disruption not as paralysis but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for deep transformation.¹ Transformation not only of our institutions, but of our ideas, our paradigm, and the way we think.

Diagnosing Polycrisis from the Margins

Why do the most influential thinkers stop at naming fear? Why do they not see possibility in crises? The answer has much to do with positionality. As Edward Said once observed, “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from a class, a set of beliefs, or a social position.” Transparency begins with recognizing where one stands and how that shapes what you can see.

I stand on the margins of the establishment. On the one hand, I am privileged to be a tenured professor in the West—without that position, it is fair to say, I wouldn’t be heard at all. On the other hand, within the establishment, I am confined to the edges. Not white, not male, foreign accent, contrarian ideas.

Take one of my recurring arguments: development begins by “using what you have.” Societies do not need perfect Western-style institutions before they can grow. They begin by creatively repurposing what exists, even when those arrangements look weak, wrong, or backward by first-world standards.

China is a vivid illustration of this pattern, but hardly unique. Actual histories of western development—not the sanitized versions—reveal the same dynamic.

Yet when I present this argument in mainstream forums, the response is consistent: “That sounds too simple.” Apparently, indigenous innovation is simplistic, while foreign-designed aid projects are rigorous and sophisticated. I am still waiting for someone to explain these double standards.

That is the vantage point from which I speak: close enough to see the establishment from within, but far enough to recognize its blind spots. From that perspective, polytunity becomes visible.

Development Born Unequal

If we want to understand how the old order’s perversions led to today’s polycrisis, there is no better arena than development. Despite being widely equated with progress and inclusion, the very concept and the industry of development were born unequal.

The word “development” was coined in the 1920s by colonial administrators as part of their “civilizing mission,” as historian Sara Lorenzini noted. It described a paternalistic duty: advanced societies would “take colonized peoples by the hands and teach them the rules of modernity.” Two decades later, development re-emerged as a global aspiration, promoted alongside newly independent postcolonial nations and the founding of the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF.

A glimpse at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference reveals the hierarchy baked into this system. John Maynard Keynes—the revered economist who chaired the meeting—grumbled that the presence of the Latin American delegates made it “the most monstrous monkey house assembled for years.” His colleague from the British Treasury added that Mexicans and Brazilians could hardly discuss matters “at the expert level.” Their role, he said bluntly, was “to sign in the place for the signature.”

The pattern continued through the Cold War, when development and foreign aid became instruments of great-power competition. For the United States and the Soviet Union, development was an ideological battleground for cajoling weaker states to follow their respective “models.” When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. and its allies declared victory. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “End of History”—the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.

From its inception, development projected hierarchy. The West set standards, and the Rest followed.

The Industrial–Colonial Paradigm

What is the intellectual foundation of that old order? I call it the industrial–colonial paradigm, which operates across a range of modern activities, from agriculture to corporate management, but particularly in development projects led by foreign experts pledging to save the poor. It rests on two entwined logics.

The first is mechanical. Technocrats study and manage societies as crude machines, like toasters. Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 Nobel laureates in economics, calls this “thinking in machine mode.” World-leading experts break down wicked problems with multiple interconnected causes into separate bits, then design precise nudges for each. Push the right button, and the machine will run.

The second is colonial. Without saying “emulate the West,” mainstream political economy treats Western capitalist democracies as the endpoint of human evolution. Just look at the parade of “global metrics” measuring governance, innovation, even “goodness” itself. The same countries are always at the top; the same are stuck at the bottom. These numbers provide statistical backing for the claim that “good institutions”—as exemplified by a select group—are universal templates for development.

Even as disruptions rattle the global development industry, it clings to this industrial–colonial paradigm, inherited from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Indeed, it is doubling down.

Consider the recent Nobel prizes in economics, the highest distinction in the discipline. In 2019, the prize went to Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer, and Duflo for addressing global poverty by breaking it down, in the words of the Nobel Committee, into “smaller and more manageable specific topics, each of which could be rigorously studied via a carefully designed field experiment.” Duflo calls this “plumbing.”

I applaud their precision. But no society has ever escaped mass poverty through aid or RCTs. Transformation has always come through national growth and innovation—inherently complex processes that demand methods and theories suited to their nature.

In 2024, the prize went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (AJR) for explaining why some countries are rich and others poor. Their answer: settler colonies prospered because Europeans brought “inclusive institutions.” The Nobel Committee praised their conclusion with this line: “The more European settlers, the greater the probability of long-run growth,” leaving one to wonder what the implications could be.

What was left out were exploitation and land grabs. Even the Financial Times noted: “they used the bits about American freedom and tossed the bits about American slavery.” The fuller truth is that settler colonies built wealth by establishing bifurcated economies: inclusive and non-extractive for elite white males, systematically extractive for everyone else.

Yet take any modal syllabus in political economy, and you will still find it stacked with these two clusters of canons. That persistence, even in the face of disruption, reveals the grip of the industrial–colonial paradigm.

Yesterday’s Development Missions

To be clear, there are merits in both canons. But when they are celebrated uncritically, they reinforce a dated worldview in which the West saves the Rest, or the Rest must become like the West.

With each passing year, the gap between our intellectual norms and the reality of a complex, disrupted, multipolar world grows wider.

Traditionally, the first mission of development was to eradicate poverty through foreign aid—specifically Western-designed interventions and RCTs rooted in a mechanistic logic. But within the first two months of 2025, the Trump 2.0 administration abruptly ended much of U.S. foreign assistance by executive order. European countries are also slashing aid budgets and reallocating funds to defense. In short: the era of aid dependence is ending—if not already over.

The second mission of development was to spread “good institutions” around the world, based on the claim that these are universal prerequisites for prosperity. But both democracy and capitalism in the West are now in deep trouble. As Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister of Germany, declared in 2024—the same year AJR won the Nobel Prize—we are witnessing “the end of the liberal West.”

As I wrote earlier in The Ideas Letter, AJR should have received the Prize 20 years ago. Winning it in 2024 made it, in the words of Mark Taylor, “the most controversial Nobel Prize in recent memory.”

Why? Because the Global Majority—home to 80% of the world’s population—is no longer willing to echo the canons. As the Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram put it, “Rewarding AJR seeks to re-legitimize the neoliberal project at a time when it is being rejected more widely than ever before.”

Yet here lies the great problem: the Majority has never been the intellectual core of the modern century. It has never been the producer of global concepts, theories, methods, or language—let alone a paradigm. That is where I hope to take a modest first step in filling the gap.

Polytunity: From Naming Fear to Building New Agendas

If polycrisis names the breakdown of the old order, polytunity names the opening it creates.

If polycrisis is Eurocentric, polytunity strives to be truly global. It exposes the false globalism of dominant frameworks and centers the marginalized majority.

If polycrisis is therapy through fear-naming, polytunity is a call to action. It is not a buzzword or slogan. And it is certainly not a “poly-opportunity” ticketed retreat with candles and songs.

Polytunity begins with a call to build new research agendas in development. Research agendas mean raising new questions, applying new methods, and collecting new data. Like any serious social science project, they require years of persistent investigation and validation. They are more than vague gestures at “rethinking” or “embracing.” They should deliver findings and patterns—not platitudes.

The paradigm I propose is called AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy.

• Adaptive means replacing machine-thinking with systems-thinking—seeing societies not as toasters with buttons, but as living forests of trees. In development, this specifically means studying development as a coevolutionary process, not a linear one.

• Inclusive means rejecting the idea that all societies must mold themselves to a single template—an idealized US or UK. AIM instead takes diversity seriously, valuing modalities and solutions tailored to context.

• Moral means acknowledging how power asymmetries shape the production of knowledge. It rejects the pretense of objectivity without positionality.

AIM draws from multiple literatures but is distinguished from each in crucial ways. I tap complex systems theories, but I underscore their lack of attention to Eurocentrism in mainstream thinking. Judging by the make-up of authorities in the field, one would think we still live in the 20th century.

I’ve also been inspired by decolonizing discourses. But I am not simply adding another critique. AIM advances a different kind of social science—one that builds new empirical agendas, including:

• Tracing causality differently;

• Measuring core concepts differently;

• Reconstructing development histories differently.

These are not daydreams. Over two decades, I have cultivated a genealogical forest rooted in AIM. The embryo was How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. From it grew more trees: China’s Gilded Age, “Unbundling Corruption,” and “Fairy Tales of Western Development.” Polytunity is both a counter-narrative to polycrisis and the portal into this budding ecosystem.

This agenda is not “anti-West” or “pro-China.” My consistent objective has been to puncture the false binary between the U.S. and China, showing how they are more alike than assumed. My purpose is to expose the hidden sinews of asymmetrical power in traditional development narratives—a necessary step toward genuine inclusion.

Development as Coevolutionary, Not Linear

Within the AIM forest, let me zoom in on one of the shoots: studying and practicing development as a coevolutionary process, not a linear one. If you “think in machine mode,” how do you see development? You theorize it as a linear cause-and-effect. Press a button, and warm bread pops up. And if you also subscribe to a Eurocentric worldview, what do you expect development-promoting institutions to look like? You assume they must resemble Western capitalist democracies.

Combine these assumptions, and you end up with the three dominant schools of thought in development:

1. Institutional theory: Development begins with good institutions that then enable growth.

2. Modernization theory: Development begins with growth that then enables good institutions.

3. Legacy theory: Development begins with a kind of colonialism that supposedly brought good institutions that led to long-run growth and better institutions, happily ever after.

All three schools are trapped in a chicken-and-egg problem—what social scientists call endogeneity. If growth and good institutions rely on each other, then which comes first? And if countries began with the “wrong” kind of colonialism, are they doomed forever?

Applying Adaptive Political Economy, my analysis begins with a different assumption: socio-economic development is by nature nonlinear. So instead of arguing about which factor comes first, or applying linear regressions to “treat endogeneity” (as if it were a disease), my work applied a particular process-tracing method to map coevolutionary —mutually causal—processes of change.

Applying Inclusive Political Economy, I also reject the assumption that the “right” institutions must look like Western ones. Instead, I conducted a decade of fieldwork in China and further years of comparative research (including the evolution of trade in late medieval Europe, public finance in antebellum United States, and the unlikely boom of Nollywood in Nigeria), letting the facts speak for themselves.

What worked in the beginning? How and why did these arrangements change over time as economies took off?

My nonlinear (Adaptive) plus non-Eurocentric (Inclusive) assumptions, which motivated a different method and perspective, led me to very different conclusions from conventional wisdom.

4. Coevolutionary theory: Development begins with “using what you have”—repurposing normatively weak, wrong, or unorthodox means to build new markets → Emerging markets stimulate and enable modern institutions → Modern institutions preserve markets.

In other words, this is a stage-variant theory of institutions. What works for advanced economies may not work for start-up economies, and vice versa. We know plenty about the “good institutions” that support advanced economies (impartial courts, technocratic bureaucracies, formal private property rights), but the canons have been largely blind to the institutions and methods that work for the start-ups.

Distilled to one line: market-building ≠ market-preserving. Institutions that fit one may not fit another.

What are the practical implications for global development? This must be a collective conversation. But to kickstart, let me name one possibility. Shouldn’t we invest in discovering what works in start-up economies—approaches unlike the standard package of “good institutions” or neoliberal prescriptions?

Policy reports occasionally sprinkle anecdotes. But imagine something bigger.

Imagine a depository of knowledge on “using what you have”—indigenous innovation, possibly enhanced with modern technologies. Or a systematic collaboration between researchers and practitioners, on a scale comparable to the World Bank’s “good governance” campaign in the 1990s.

Picture a generation of brilliant social scientists refining our understanding of development as a coevolutionary process. Over the last 40 years, economists have produced 1.4 million RCTs and papers on cash transfers to the poor. Instead, imagine just 1,400 papers on how entrepreneurship emerges out of adversity, and what governments can do to build new markets, beyond preserving existing ones.

From my experience on the margins of the establishment, you’ll be told: “Too simple.” “I don’t see any policy implications.” “There’s nothing new—Adam Smith has said it all.” But the deniers cannot deny one thing: their own traditional approaches do not work. They are obsolete.

That is why I say: the polycrisis is a polytunity—if you seize on disruption to reset paradigms.

The Future of Development

Development is a test-ground for the possibility of harnessing crises for renewal in a variety of settings.

The profession can no longer revolve around the old missions of foreign aid and importing templates. Poverty reduction requires diversified growth strategies and indigenous innovation, not more precisely measured nudges. Good governance means designing stage-specific institutions tailored to context.

Actualizing these new directions calls for a different intellectual foundation—AIM. I share my theoretical and empirical work not as a blueprint, but as a compass. Of course, one person’s effort is small. But imagine if a community comes together.

As Margarita Cedeño, a former Vice President of the Dominican Republic, wrote in a resonating editorial: “Moving from polycrisis to polyunity is not just a semantic exercise. It is an invitation to change the paradigm from which we interpret reality and design the future.”

Against the backdrop of the UN meeting, the choice for leaders and change-makers is simple. Will you keep naming fear? Or will you join in building new knowledge systems and policy agendas?

That is the call of polytunity.

Copyright ©

To Learn More

• Read Ang’s op-ed “The World Order After 2025” at Project Syndicate, published on the eve of 2026.

• Introductory essay on AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is now published and open-access at Oxford Development Studies.

Polytunity in Other Languages

• Spanish: “Poliunidad” (Listin Dario, Dominican Republic, July 2025)

• Chinese: “多重機遇” (HK Economic Journal, Honk Kong, November 2025)

• Romanian: “Polytunitatea globală” (Economistul, Romania, December 2025)

Reprinted from “The World Order After 2025,” Project Syndicate, 31 December, 2025, by Yuen Yuen Ang.

For a mathematician, 2025 might stand out for being a “perfect square”: 45 multiplied by 45, a rare symmetry. But its significance goes far beyond numerical elegance – it marks the year the postwar global order expired, and a new one was about to be born.

Eighty years ago, as the world emerged from World War II, the victorious Western Allies designed a system intended to prevent another catastrophic conflict. The result was a global order based on three intertwined promises: geopolitical stability anchored by American leadership, industrial progress that would steadily raise living standards, and globalization that would spread prosperity through trade and integration.

That postwar order delivered real achievements. In the West, a burgeoning middle class enjoyed political freedom and economic prosperity. Globally, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. For a time, the direction of history seemed clear, and, particularly after the end of the Cold War, even inevitable.

But, with hindsight, we can see that the postwar order carried the seeds of its demise. Authority was concentrated within Western-led institutions that claimed to speak for the world. US hegemony often led to overreach and hubris: a generation of wars in the Middle East proved costly, and confidence in the US model’s superiority obscured the reality of domestic decay.

Globalization entrenched a lopsided bargain. Low-cost manufacturing in poor countries allowed consumers in rich countries to buy abundantly, but at a global environmental cost. As firms in America and Europe moved their production overseas, local communities lost jobs and vitality. At the same time, financialization made it easier to accumulate wealth simply through speculation and stock-price inflation, further enriching the richest without delivering social value.

The 2008 financial crisis was an early warning. US policymakers stabilized the system but did not repair it. Inequality rose and politics grew angrier. By the time Donald Trump was re-elected to the US presidency, his political rise was no longer an aberration. It was the bill coming due.

The accumulated stress became impossible to ignore in 2025, particularly in the former ruling powers. Transatlantic alliances once thought permanent were ruptured. Trade wars and protectionist industrial policy signaled the end of frictionless trade. Populism in democracies revealed a deeper loss of trust in elite institutions, and immigrants became an easy scapegoat.

Add the worsening impact of climate change and it is little wonder that Western leaders and thinkers have been feeling overwhelmed by the “polycrisis.”

The term “polycrisis” rightly describes the tangle of global dangers. But it fails to diagnose their root causes, validating fear but obscuring responsibility. It also frames Western shocks as global threats, while overlooking the agency of the rest of the world, also known as the global majority.

Rather than simply naming the death of the old, we must ask what might replace it. After all, while profound disruption carries acute risks, it also provides a rare opening for deep transformation. That is why we should view this moment not as a polycrisis, but as a “polytunity” – a generational opening for global transformation from the margins.

Some contours of the new world order – three in particular – are already visible. Geopolitically, it will be characterized by multipolarity, with the US and China as the two largest powers but neither as a single hegemon. Such a diffusion of power need not lead to chaos if non-dominant countries take more responsibility for delivering global public goods and find creative means to collaborate.

Moreover, AI will transform how humans live and work. Depending on how it is regulated and used, AI could lead to a greater concentration of power and wealth, but it could also lower barriers to knowledge and productivity – for example, through translation, tutoring, and rapid problem-solving – especially for communities long excluded from elite networks.

Lastly, globalization will not disappear, but its form will change. Long, fragile supply chains optimized purely for efficiency are giving way to shorter, more resilient ones. Today’s developing countries can no longer count on exporting to rich markets to generate growth; instead, they must also cooperate with their neighbors and dismantle regional barriers to trade.

Whether the world seizes the polytunity or succumbs to the polycrisis depends fundamentally on mindset. Even as Western political and economic dominance wanes, Western narratives of disruption as despair continue to dominate. Yet nowhere is a mindset shift more urgent than among the global majority, which has more potential for agency today than it ever did before.

Such a mindset must be adaptive, inclusive, and moral – what I call AIM. To be adaptive is to discover and enable possibilities, not just control risks. To be inclusive is to eschew one-size-fits-all models in favor of bespoke solutions that harness indigenous knowledge and capabilities. And to be moral is to question how asymmetrical power has shaped dominant ideas and voices, while amplifying those that have historically been marginalized.

An earlier “perfect square” year was 1600, heralding the Age of Enlightenment that would transform Europe and, eventually, the world. The Enlightenment championed reason and freedom, but it also justified empire and domination – not only of the West over the rest, but also of humans over nature. We have a chance to do better: to build a more plural, more equal, and more ecologically grounded world order.

But the future that emerges after 2025 depends crucially on the worldview we choose. Lamenting the polycrisis reinforces paralysis, whereas embracing the polytunity encourages change.

Copyright ©

To Learn More

• Read “Polytunity: The Future of Development” at The Ideas Letter (open access).

• For a shorter read, see “The Global Polytunity” at Project Syndicate.

Polytunity in Other Languages

• Chinese (simplified): 洪源远：2025年后的世界秩序 (Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore)

• Slovak: Čo mali spoločné roky 1600 a 2025? Boli perfektné štvorce a priniesli zmeny (Denník N, Slovakia)

• Spanish: El orden mundial después de 2025 (La Prensa, Nicaragua)

Why Polytunity? Why Now?

Why do I say we’re living in a time of polytunity, not just polycrisis?

Because real transformation only becomes possible when the old order breaks down.
That’s not optimism—but realism.

Humans tend to ignore problems or patch things up until we’re forced to change. And the more deeply people are invested in the old order, the more they mourn and resist its passing.

The dominant “polycrisis” narrative presents itself as a global crisis. But is it really global? Does it truly speak for everyone? Or does it project the anxiety of those who still command the loudspeaker but fear losing control? Does the polycrisis meme distract us from seeing the possibilities of our times?

Polytunity goes beyond naming fear. It names the opening created by disruption: a once-in-a-generation chance to rethink our assumptions, institutions, and systems for a hyper-complex, multipolar world.

But I am not interested in critique for critique’s sake. We have more than enough “critiques” already. What we lack are alternatives. This is why I advance AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy.

• Adaptive: societies are complex systems, not machines.

• Inclusive: there is no single Western benchmark for progress.

• Moral: power shapes whose knowledge counts, and whose voices are erased.

Think of AIM as a reorientation, a way of thinking that resets our assumptions, the invisible “source codes” embedded in our minds.

AIM is not just about changing how you think, but also who you hear and see, or do not.

Who has been excluded from global discourse? At first, I thought mainly along a regional dimension: non-Western societies. As this Substack evolved, I realized the exclusion is also generational. We rarely hear directly from Gen Z, even though they will inherit the transition from the post-1945 order to whatever comes next.

Thus, on this Substack, you’ll see young adults bring AIM to life by applying it to issues they care about—from climate action, immigration, U.S.-China comparison, and Native American history to their own life experiences.

If you are new here, begin with this essay.
Everything else flows from here.

The Global Polytunity

Project Syndicate

The Global Polytunity

Western leaders favor the language of “polycrisis” because it obscures the root cause of our current predicament: the industrial-colonial paradigm. Instead of focusing on fear, the world must study and tackle development challenges with a purposeful realism that draws on the creativity of a genuinely global community…

Read more

9 months ago · 8 likes · Project Syndicate

WASHINGTON, DC – Conflicts, trade wars, inequality, and democratic decay fill today’s headlines. Each crisis appears to be feeding the next, and it can feel as though the world is coming apart. Western leaders and thinkers have embraced a single word to capture this entanglement of threats: “polycrisis.”

Adam Tooze, the Columbia University historian who helped popularize the term, summarized its appeal in 2023: “Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. This is what it might be called.” But when fear becomes the central theme, the result can only be angst and paralysis, as Mark Leonard observed after the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos.

Crises, however, are not necessarily followed by collapse. In fact, disruption has often paved the way for renewal – but only for those who were willing to let go of the old order.

With that in mind, I see the same moment through a different lens – as polytunity, a term I coined in a November 2024 Project Syndicate commentary and then later elaborated at the United Nations Development Program. The idea is simple: Simultaneous disruptions offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the deep transformation of global institutions and ideas. When everything seems to crumble at once, we are forced to go beyond patchwork solutions and redesign systems from the ground up.

For starters, we should recognize that the polycrisis is a Western-centric narrative masquerading as global. Two European theorists coined the word in 1993, while another European expert popularized it recently. A Western-based summit of elites gave the term a prominent platform, prompting its viral amplification by Western media, think tanks, and academics.

Despite constant lamentations about a “ghastly future,” the conversation on polycrisis rarely, if ever, acknowledges the agency of the non-Western world – nowadays euphemistically called the “Global South” – or the solutions it has offered. Even as some theorists call for “Renewed Humanism,” they fail to confront the reality of a structurally unequal order and growing frustrations with it. Western dominance of international finance and institutions persists, while non-Western ideas and voices remain marginalized in supposedly global canons.

The establishment favors the language of polycrisis because it obscures the root causes of global breakdowns, making them appear like natural disasters. In reality, today’s overlapping crises can be traced back to the industrial-colonial paradigm that has prevailed since the Industrial Revolution, a worldview that defined progress as control: mechanical control over nature, and Western control over the rest of the world.

To be sure, that chapter of modernization produced immense material and social gains. But it also sowed the seeds of our current predicament. Global warming, the defining crisis of our time, is the result of an extractive industrial model, supported by a trading system in which workers in poor countries manufacture for low pay what consumers in rich countries purchase in excess.

The industrial-colonial paradigm has expired in a hyper-complex, multipolar world. We need a new mindset – which I call AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive, and Moral Political Economy. To be adaptive is to govern societies not as crude machines, but as living networks that learn and evolve. To be inclusive is to recognize that progress depends on using what you have, which means mobilizing local creativity rather than copying the models of the rich and powerful. And to be moral is to acknowledge that ideas are shaped by power, and to redress this imbalance.

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Over the course of decades of research, I have studied China – as well as other countries – through the lens of AIM. In my book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, I traced development not as a linear path, but as a co-evolutionary process, marked by a recursive feedback loop (Adaptive). This analysis showed that the strategies that create new markets can look starkly different from standard prescriptions for “good institutions” (Inclusive). Then, in China’s Gilded Age, I challenged the Orientalist assumption of “Chinese exceptionalism,” revealing that China’s trajectory mirrors forgotten Western histories, not the mythologized versions taught in textbooks (Moral).

AIM provides a compass for thinking and policymaking in an age when the global majority is increasingly taking ownership of its own development, rather than following Western formulas or waiting to be rescued from poverty through aid.

Consider, for example, that China, India, and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in clean energy, while sub-Saharan African countries are experimenting with energy leapfrogging. And as US tariffs shrink export options to high-income markets for late developers like Vietnam and Ethiopia, South-South trade is surpassing North-South trade in volume.

On the intellectual front, the experts most qualified to teach about the “political economy of justice” and “circular economy” are not philosophers or consultants in Europe and North America, but indigenous groups who have long protected ecosystems, despite centuries of dispossession.

Polytunity is not a call for naive optimism in the face of existential threats. Instead, it represents purposeful realism that draws on the creativity of a genuinely global community, not a single region or privileged class. Nor does it promote platitudes or vibes. Polytunity is a constructive agenda grounded in an empirical foundation. Applied correctly and seriously, it should change the way we study and tackle a range of challenges, not least development.

What we are witnessing is not the end of progress, but rather the end of the industrial-colonial paradigm and the beginning of another – if we have the conviction to build it now.

Copyright . “The Global Polytunity” was published in Project Syndicate on 29 October 2025.

Multilingual Translations

As part of our longer-term aspiration to making this site a multipolar platform—where readers can hear what the world thinks—we share these translations:

• Chinese Simplified - 多重机遇: Business Times (Singapore), Lianhe Zaobao (Singapore)

• Chinese Traditional - 多重機遇: Up Media (Taiwan), HK Economic Journal [HK]

• Croatian - Politunitet: Poslovni dnevnik

• Farsi - رصت‌های چندگانه جهانی: Atlas Diplomacy

• German: Taz

• Italian - Poliopportunità: at Substack

• Romanian - Polytunitatea: Economistul (Romania)

• Spanish - Politunidad: Perfil (Argentina)

• English-language reprints have appeared in Arab News (Saudi Arabia), Business Times (Singapore), Jamaica Gleaner (Jamaica), Manila Times (Philippines), New Zealand Interest (New Zealand), Yicai (China).

To Learn More

• Longer Essay - “Polytunity: The Future of Development”

• Institutional Hub - “The Polytunity Project”

Polytunity is my new platform for sharing ideas on turning the polycrisis into polytunity.

Hello and welcome! This is where I’ll post essays, talks, and reflections that advance this paradigm shift, and invite changemakers to share their voices and initiatives.

For an introduction, see my essay in The Ideas Letter (4 Sept 2025): Polytunity: The Future of Development.

If polycrisis names the breakdown of the old order, polytunity names the opening it creates.

If polycrisis is Eurocentric, polytunity strives to be truly global. It exposes the false globalism of dominant frameworks and centers the marginalized majority.

If polycrisis is therapy through fear-naming, polytunity is a call to action. It is not a buzzword or slogan. And it is certainly not a “poly-opportunity” ticketed retreat with candles and songs.

Polytunity is the crystallization of my 20-year intellectual journey, beginning with my first field trip in Beijing and Zouping county in Shandong province in 2006. Ten years later, that adventure metamorphosed into my first book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), which seeded AIM (Adaptive + Inclusive + Moral) Political Economy, which I’m advancing today as a paradigm fit for a disrupted, multipolar world.

If you’d like to follow along, please subscribe and share Polytunity.

Stay tuned for more.

Yuen Yuen Ang

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