“It is only when the old order breaks down that we are forced to reflect on what went wrong.” Polycrisis reflects Western anxiety over the decline of the old order. Polytunity, on the other hand, sees breakdown as a once-in-a-generation opening for new voices and new directions.

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“We must move from a polycrisis to a polytunity”, Interview originally published in Danish in Mandag Morgen, 21 May 2026. Translated into English.

The concept of polycrisis has been central in describing the many overlapping crises the world faces today. But the concept focuses primarily on fear, and not the opportunities—for new voices and new directions—that emerge when the old global order breaks down, argues political economist Yuen Yuen Ang. She instead proposes the concept of polytunity.

Talk of a world in crisis has been with us for years now. One hardly needs to list the crises anymore—they bleed into each other. War drives up energy prices; higher energy costs fuel hunger; hunger accelerates migration. The spiral continues. Crises, by their nature, cannot be contained, as the widely discussed concept of polycrisis suggests. They multiply and compound. Read enough bleak headlines and total collapse can start to seem inevitable.

But that is not how we should view crises, says Yuen Yuen Ang, a Singaporean political economist at Johns Hopkins University. The crisis narrative, she argues, blinds us to the opportunities these very crises create.

The term “polycrisis” was popularized by Adam Tooze at the World Economic Forum in 2023, who defined it this way: “Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. That is what it might be called.”

“We should not think of our time with only fear, but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for deep transformation of global thought and governance: how we think, the way we live, and who gets to define the emerging future,” says Ang.

“It is only when the old order breaks down that we are forced to reflect on what went wrong.” Asked why crisis should be seen as an opportunity, she is unambiguous. For Yuen Yuen Ang, polytunity is not just optimism, but realism—true renewal only becomes possible in times of breakdown. Otherwise, the instinct is to maintain the status quo.

“Yet notice this: the voices who told us that the old system was doing fine are the same ones mourning the polycrisis today. How can the same prescriptions from the same sources solve new problems?” she says. The same people and institutions still dominate global discourse, even as the conversation has shifted from celebrating Western ideals of freedom to cataloguing crises.

Ang adds that even her college-age students recognize the blind spot. One student contributing to her “Polytunity: The Gen-Z Series” on Substack, wrote: “The polycrisis is not breaking students. It reveals the limits of machine logic.”

In short, what is missing is not simply hope—but new voices and new directions.

The World Is Not a Zero Sum Game

As the author of two acclaimed books on systems thinking and China, Yuen Yuen Ang has advised U.S. policymakers on China policy. As a Singaporean who has lived and worked in the United States, she is well placed to read the world from multiple vantage points. The postwar global order—built on geopolitical stability anchored by the United States, industrial development, and rapid globalization through free trade—produced real results worldwide. But according to Ang, that order is now breaking down.

“By fixating on fear, the ‘polycrisis’ abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear like natural disasters rather than systemic outcomes; for example, rising inequality results from hyper-capitalism, and climate change proves the limits of industrial extraction.”

This is not anti-Western thinking. It is a recognition that the old world no longer works for the majority of people—including those in the West.

“It is not a division between East and West, but between individuals who have greatly benefited from the old world and the rest, who in one way or another know that the status quo is not perfect.”

MT: There are always some, both countries and individuals, who benefit more from crises than others. Does this not create fundamental conflicts of interest in maintaining the status quo?

“That assumes we live in a zero sum situation, where Western decline benefits the rest of the world. But that is not how the world works. When the United States is in crisis, we all suffer,” says Ang.

MT: But looking at the world, many leaders seem to think in zero sum terms. In Africa, major powers compete for critical minerals, and in the Middle East it is about controlling oil.

“There are certainly situations where one country gains resources that another does not. It would be foolish to deny that,” she explains.

“But that kind of thinking does not reflect the full reality today. Even if you try to secure resources for yourself, the paradox is that you still need everyone else to trade with,” she says, calling for leaders to recognize how interdependent countries are.

“Your problems quickly become someone else’s problems further down the line, so we need more sophisticated thinking if we are to solve the many crises the world faces.”

The United States and China Are More Similar Than We Think

In discussions about Western decline and overlapping crises, it is impossible to ignore China’s rapid rise. In just a few decades, it has gone from a large but poor country to a major trade and industrial rival to the United States, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.

A few years ago, Joe Biden attempted to kickstart green industrialization through large scale tax incentives such as the Inflation Reduction Act, while Donald Trump sought to curb China’s trade power through tariffs. But according to Ang, the United States and China have more in common than many believe.

“We often analyze international relations through opposites. During the Cold War, it was the United States and the Soviet Union, and now it is the United States and China,” she says. This way of thinking leads people to assume that one side will eventually collapse while the other will win.

“It is like a script with a plot, characters, and stereotypes that shape a particular viewpoint.

“But if you look closely, the United States and China are more alike than most people think.”

MT: How?

“They share a similar struggle with the problems of capitalism. It is a battle between two gilded ages, where both countries have extreme inequality, elite dealmaking, speculative bubbles, and the rise of powerful figures in technology and finance not seen since the nineteenth century,” she says, noting that the primary difference is that one is a democracy and the other is a one party state.

“By thinking about relations between the United States and China in this way, we can challenge the binary understanding that dominates today. The challenges are largely the same in both countries: inequality, greed, and high living costs.”

“So when we share many of the same problems, we can also find shared solutions.”

The World Does Not Have to Become Like the West

For Ang, the answer is not more of the same. Since the end of the Cold War, the prevailing idea has been that the rest of the world simply needs to catch up with the West—to move, in the old language, from the third world to the first. Ang sees this as a mechanistic way of thinking about deeply complex problems.

“Our modern existence is defined by industrialization, where we instinctively see the world as a simple machine, where pressing the right buttons produces a desired result.”

“But for many developing countries, this becomes a limiting vision, because the destination is already predetermined by more powerful countries.”

For Ang, Western countries must also recognize that they can learn from the rest of the world if we are to turn the polycrisis into polytunity. Already, the center of economic gravity has shifted from north to south, reducing the West’s global appeal. According to Ang, the West can see this as either a threat or an opportunity.

“You can see it as a loss of power and dominance, but that leads to fear and paralysis,” she says.

“Or you can see it as an opportunity for Western countries to start learning from the global South.”

She asks: “Must development always move from north to south, from rich to poor, from modern to traditional, or can we actually learn from each other in ways that help us rethink the crises that define our time?”

Translated from Danish and reprinted from Mandag Morgen

Learn More

• 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.

• Read The Clash of Two Gilded Ages: The U.S. and China are more similar than most people think.

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In this review of Yuen Yuen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Chidinma Linda Obi shares an incisive “Nigerian reading” of the book. What resonates most? Not a new set of prescriptions, but a different way of seeing — one that starts not from what Nigeria lacks, but from what it already has to work with.

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap is now free to download at the book's official webpage.

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A Book Review of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, “The Pauper’s Dilemma: How Development Happens, and what Nigeria might Learn From It,” Nextier, May 2026,

By Chidinma Linda Obi

Introduction

Why do some nations prosper while others languish? Economists have been arguing about it for a long time, and tend to disagree by generation. The 1950s and 1960s favoured state planning, import substitution and the “big push”. The 1970s and 1980s preferred markets, liberalisation and outward orientation. By the late 1980s these convictions hardened into the Washington Consensus, a tidy package of macroeconomic discipline, privatisation and open trade. The 1990s added a postscript: markets alone would not suffice; countries also needed institutions, such as independent courts, professional bureaucracies, secure property rights. Refined many times since, this framework still anchors mainstream development thinking. In short, each era picked its preferred variables and built a doctrine around them.

The verdict is now in, and it is unflattering. Most countries that began the post-war period poor are poor still. The handful that genuinely escaped did so by ignoring what the doctors ordered. China, the largest of these exceptions, entered its reform era in 1980 with GDP per person of $193—poorer than Bangladesh, Chad, Nigeria or Malawi. It went on to become the world’s second-largest economy without first installing the institutional plumbing the textbooks deemed essential. Property rights were shaky, enforcement patchy, and the system ran on relationships, hierarchy and discretion rather than rules. By the standards of orthodox theory, China should not have grown. It grew anyway.

This is the puzzle Yuen Yuen Ang sets out to crack in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. The orthodox debate, she observes, is really a quarrel about sequence: does growth produce good institutions, or do good institutions produce growth? Each school rearranges the same variables, and each crashes into the same wall. Poor countries cannot wait for wealth to deliver institutions, nor afford the institutions that deliver wealth. Ang opens with a parable. A pauper consults two financial advisers. The first tells him to acquire wealth before bothering with money management; the second tells him to acquire prerequisites before earning. Both pieces of counsel are useless, because each assumes away the very thing the pauper lacks.

Yuen Yuen Ang’s solution is to drop the sequencing question altogether. Development, she argues, is not a linear chain but a process of co-evolution: states and markets shape each other as they go, neither arriving first. They adapt jointly through three mechanisms she traces across the Chinese case:

• variation in how local officials interpret directives from the centre;

• selection, as approaches that work survive and others are abandoned;

• and niche creation, which turns regional differences into productive specialisation rather than chaos.

This essay leans heavily on Yuen Yuen Ang’s book and on discussions at two reading groups in Nigeria—the Nextier Public Policy Book Club and The Long View Book Club—both convened by Patrick O. Okigbo III, founding partner of Nextier. It sets out her central contribution, and asks what it implies for Nigeria.

How Development Actually Happens

If the orthodox prescriptions have failed, what is the alternative? Yuen Yuen Ang’s answer is not another list of ingredients, but a different theory of how the dish gets made. Three ideas do most of the work: that development is a process of co-evolution rather than assembly; that it must begin with the materials at hand rather than those a textbook prefers; and that adaptation, not design, is what carries countries from poor to less so. Each deserves a closer look.

Development is a coevolutionary process

Development is too often treated as a recipe. Install the right institutions, apply the right policies, and growth will duly arrive. Assemble the correct parts and the machine will run. This logic works for some systems. It does not work for this one.

Development, Yuen Yuen Ang argues, is complex, not merely complicated. In a complicated system, for instance, a jet engine, outcomes can be engineered by bolting well-understood parts together. In a complex one, the parts themselves change through interaction. Components do not simply fit; they reshape each other as they go.

The relationship between markets and institutions is the obvious illustration. Institutions built to support markets are themselves remade by the markets they enable. Markets that emerge within existing institutional constraints, in turn, push back on those institutions and refashion them. Change is iterative, not linear. Policies meet local conditions, throw off unexpected results, and are tweaked accordingly. Some adaptations work and spread; others fail and are quietly abandoned.

Start with what you have

If markets emerge through co-evolution rather than from a standardised blueprint, the question shifts. It is no longer what poor countries lack, but what they already have to work with. Donald Rumsfeld, for all his other faults, had a point: you go to war with the Army you have, not the one you wish you had.

Conventional development thinking starts from absence. It catalogues the gaps between poor and rich economies and prescribes the institutions needed to close them. This assumes that the institutional forms found in rich countries are the inputs to growth. The evidence points the other way. Such institutions typically arrive after markets have taken hold; they stabilise systems already in motion rather than conjure them into being.

The institutional landscape of an early developer looks rather different. The clearest case is the rise of Township and Village Enterprises in rural China during the early reform years. Collectively owned and run by local governments, these were an awkward hybrid. They were neither private firm nor state-owned enterprise but fitted to the political constraints of a transitional economy. They were what was available, and they worked.

Adaptation through directed improvisation

Starting from what exists raises a second question: how does adaptation actually happen?

The classic textbook answer is that central authorities design solutions and roll them out. In practice this breaks down quickly. Local conditions vary, information is incomplete, and the centre is rarely as clever as it thinks. Systems that work tend to combine direction from above with problem-solving from below.

Yuen Yuen Ang calls this “directed improvisation.” The centre sets priorities and tilts incentives; local actors experiment within those bounds. The arrangement runs on three mechanisms. Variation lets local officials deviate from central directives and tailor solutions to their own conditions. Selection defines what counts as success, and ties rewards and promotions to it, so that approaches which deliver get reinforced and copied. Niche creation treats regional diversity as a source of useful specialisation rather than messy incoherence, letting different local models emerge and persist side by side.

The Catalyst for Adaptation

China in 1976 was emerging, bruised, from the Cultural Revolution. Within a few years it was running special economic zones and tolerating township enterprises. The interesting question is not what changed, but what made change possible at all.

The answer is leadership; albeit, of an unusual kind. At critical junctures, it acts as the catalyst for adaptation. Deng Xiaoping played that role in China. In his 1978 speech, Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth From Facts and Unite As One In Looking to the Future, he quietly reset the basis on which policy would be judged. Ideological loyalty would no longer be the test of correctness. Practice would. If something worked, it was permitted.

Two phrases came to define the era that followed: “cross the river by feeling for the stones” and “it does not matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” Both marked a clean break from the preceding decades, when policy was measured against ideological purity and deviation could be career-ending, and often, worse.

What tends to get missed is the nature of Deng’s intervention. Development, Ang argues, is too often cast as a problem of control: leaders are meant to know the right answers and impose them. The Chinese experience suggests something else.

Deng’s leadership did not prescribe particular solutions, nor lay out a detailed blueprint for reform. It set the direction and changed the rules by which success would be measured. The centre established priorities; it did not dictate how those priorities were to be met. That, in turn, created room for local variation within a common framework.

In complex systems, the full range of problems and solutions cannot be foreseen. Attempts to control outcomes from above tend to smother the very experimentation that progress requires. What leadership can do instead is operate by influence: defining goals, setting bounds, and shaping how success is judged. It alters the behaviour of the system without dictating its results.

Lessons For Nigeria

What does any of this mean for Nigeria? Reading the country through Ang’s framework is not an exercise in importing Chinese lessons. Nigeria is not China, and pretending otherwise has produced more bad policy than good. Rather, it is an exercise in seeing Nigeria’s own situation more clearly. Two questions require attention. First, what preconditions for adaptation has Nigeria assembled, and which has it failed to? Second, how do the three mechanisms of directed improvisation (variation, selection and niche creation) actually map onto Nigerian realities?

The Preconditions: Agency, the Mind, Culture and Confidence

History sets the stage; it does not write the play

Some accounts of Nigeria’s underdevelopment begin with history, and rightly so. Colonial extraction, the politicisation of regional and ethnic identities, and the patronage politics that followed independence all left their marks. No serious account of Nigeria’s predicament can wave these away. But history is not destiny. It shapes the ground on which societies act; it does not abolish the act itself. The danger of purely exogenous explanations is that they quietly evict agency from the story. Development becomes something that happens to a country, rather than something a country does.

Tocqueville put it well in Democracy in America: “Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too with peoples.” The past sets the starting conditions. It does not determine the end.

Confidence is agency in working clothes

Recovering agency in the Nigerian context begins, awkwardly, in the mind. Patrick O. Okigbo III argues in What it Means to Be Human that colonial inheritance reshaped not only institutions but the confidence to question received wisdom. The result is a habit of deference to external prescriptions, imported frameworks and externally validated answers.

Nigeria’s adoption of the Structural Adjustment Programme is the canonical illustration. The point is not that all foreign ideas are wrong, nor that domestic opinion is always right; that would simply swap one dogma for another. It is that prescriptions become dangerous when they are adopted by deference rather than analysis. When domestic economists warned that the programme would carry severe social and economic costs, the deeper question was not only whether they were correct. It was whether the Nigerian state had the confidence and institutional discipline to interrogate the prescription on its own terms, adapt it to local conditions, and accept the consequences. It did not.

Despair has a development cost

The third precondition is engagement. In Against Despair, Okigbo warns against the temptation to withdraw from public life on the grounds that the system is too broken to repair. This matters because adaptation requires reform actors; entrepreneurs willing to build in difficult markets, civil servants willing to mend broken processes, teachers willing to push past the syllabus, researchers willing to ask sharper questions, citizens willing to remain invested in the possibility of change. When too many capable people exit, the country loses more than talent. It loses adaptive capacity.

Despair, in other words, has a measurable price. It thins the pool of people willing to experiment, repair and build. Fewer experiments mean less learning. Less learning entrenches institutional failure. Over time, the loop closes on itself.

Culture determines whether learning can scale

The fourth precondition is culture. Adaptation cannot scale unless society rewards the behaviours that make learning possible: questioning authority, testing claims, applying useful knowledge, tolerating failure, and judging ideas by evidence rather than status.

Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth makes the historical case. The Industrial Revolution was not only a story of inventions, capital and markets; it rested on a cultural shift that preceded it. In early modern Europe, the status of useful knowledge rose. Practical inquiry gained prestige. Claims became contestable. The “Republic of Letters” created a transnational community in which ideas could circulate, be challenged and be refined. Modern growth, on Mokyr’s argument, required not only invention but a culture that believed knowledge could accumulate and be put to work on the material world.

Nigeria has cultural assets to build on—resilience, entrepreneurial energy, a young population. These explain why Nigerians continue to build, trade, organise and improvise in conditions that would defeat many others. But raw energy is not the same as cumulative learning. A culture of growth requires something more disciplined: inquiry rather than deference, experimentation rather than conformity, useful knowledge rather than status credentials, evidence rather than assertion. Three habits stand in the way.

The first is epistemic deference. Nigerian society places considerable weight on age, religious authority, traditional title, professional rank and credentials. These hierarchies sustain order and continuity, but when they shield claims from challenge, they slow learning. In adaptive societies, the question is not only “who said it?” but “is it true, how do we know, and what evidence would change our mind?”

The second is causal substitution. This is not a critique of religion. The issue is whether empirical problems get diagnosed empirically. When business failure, public-health failure or institutional failure is explained chiefly through spiritual, personal or moral categories, the habit of causal analysis atrophies.

The third is credentialism. Nigeria values education highly, but too often treats credentials as status markers rather than entry points to inquiry. The degree becomes the destination, not the start of disciplined learning. This helps explain why formal education does not consistently translate into applied research, technical capability or institutional problem-solving. A society can produce many graduates and still struggle to generate useful knowledge if education rewards certification more than curiosity.

Yet Nigeria also has indigenous systems with the seeds of a culture of growth. The Igbo apprenticeship system, Igba Boi, transmits practical commercial knowledge, embeds learning inside enterprise, builds trust through social networks and creates pathways for capital accumulation. Yoruba commercial traditions and Hausa long-distance trading networks operate on similar logics of practical learning, trust, risk-sharing and intergenerational capability transfer. These systems should not be romanticised; they have limits. But they show that Nigeria is not starting from nothing. The country already has cultural infrastructure for learning by doing. The opportunity is to connect it to modern education, finance, technology and enterprise.

Education is the lever

The lever for shifting culture is education, but not as currently practised in Nigeria. The system, particularly at primary and secondary levels, still rewards memorisation over inquiry, deference over critique, conformity over experimentation. Many students are trained to treat knowledge as a stock of authorised answers rather than a method of investigation.

A culture of growth would require a different posture. Assessment would reward evidence-based reasoning, not only recall. Classrooms would permit questioning, not only repetition. Teacher training would model inquiry, not merely transmission. Technical education would be linked to production. Apprenticeship pathways would be connected to formal skills systems. Failure would be treated as information, not disgrace.

This is a long horizon, and an urgent one. Nigeria’s demographic structure means its future cultural habits are being formed now. The next generation is learning, explicitly or implicitly, how to think about authority, evidence, work, failure and knowledge. That formation will decide whether Nigeria’s dynamism becomes cumulative capability—or remains, as it too often does, motion without progress.

Variation, Selection, Niche Creation: Which Parts Work?

The preconditions describe the soil. The three mechanisms of directed improvisation describe the machinery that runs in it. Which parts of that machinery already exist in Nigeria, and which are broken?

Variation: present in abundance

Variation is the room local actors have to deviate from central directives and adapt solutions to their conditions. In Nigeria it abounds. The federal structure gives states constitutionally protected revenues, elected leaders and considerable formal autonomy. Abia, Bayelsa, Benue, Bornu, Ekiti, Sokoto are free to pursue different economic strategies, and they do. Nor is there any shortage of underlying difference: states vary in political history, economic structure, administrative capacity, commercial culture and sectoral strength. The problem is not that Nigeria lacks variation. The problem is that variation does not consistently translate into learning, experimentation or feedback.

Niche creation: visible, but unmoored

Niche creation is the process by which regional diversity becomes a source of useful specialisation. Nigeria has the raw material. Lagos has built its economy around finance, services, logistics, technology and trade. Anambra has deep commercial and entrepreneurial traditions. Kano historically anchored northern manufacturing and trans-Sahelian commerce. Ogun benefits from proximity to Lagos and an expanding industrial base. The Niger Delta states sit on hydrocarbons that could yet be parlayed into a broader energy and petrochemical capability.

The weakness is that these niches are not embedded in any coherent national development strategy. Lagos grows largely on its own internal momentum. Anambra’s commercial energy remains under-institutionalised. Kano’s manufacturing base has weakened. Oil-producing states have not turned resource wealth into broad-based productive capacity. Nigeria has niches; it has not yet stitched them into an architecture for structural transformation.

Selection: the broken link

Selection is where Nigeria’s adaptive machinery fails most clearly. Selection defines what success means, measures performance against it, and rewards the actors who deliver. China’s Communist Party answered the question of national success narrowly and unambiguously: success meant material prosperity, measurable in growth, employment and infrastructure. That answer became the spine that organised every subsequent reform.

Nigeria has made no equivalent decision. As the 2025 Nextier Development Festival report argues, the country has many aspirations but no sufficiently disciplined definition of the economy it is trying to build. In the absence of a clear hierarchy, sectoral policies do not align and public investments do not reinforce one another. Each agency optimises for its own brief, and the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

Even if Nigeria defined success more clearly, the incentives facing subnational officials would still blunt selection. Governors and local-government chairmen are not principally rewarded for raising productivity, expanding production or building competitive firms. They are rewarded for political survival, control of patronage, access to federal allocation, and the management of ethnic and electoral coalitions. Their behaviour is rational within the system, because the system rewards distribution rather than creation.

Osita Chidoka, Nigeria’s former minister of Aviation, makes this point in his session on Nextier Development Discourse titled, The Trouble with Nigeria and How to Fix It. Nigeria’s pattern of state formation, he argues, actively limits the competition and innovation that drive development. The federal allocation system distributes resources to states regardless of their economic performance, so subnational political machines can be sustained on patronage flows that do not depend on productivity, enterprise or internally generated growth.

Jude Uzonwanne, in another Nextier Development Discourse session titled, Building Africa’s First Trillion Dollar Economy, makes a complementary point. Nigeria’s fiscal and political architecture, organised around federal allocation and rent distribution, rewards consumption rather than adaptation or production. Whatever success means at the national level, its translation into subnational behaviour is short-circuited by a fiscal structure that pays officials regardless of what they produce. Selection breaks down because the rewards are detached from productive performance.

Changing this means changing the rewards. It means tying subnational advancement to measurable economic performance. It means restructuring fiscal flows so that locally generated revenue matters more to a state’s prospects than its slice of federal allocation. It means engineering horizontal competition between states, so that each jurisdiction has reason to outperform the next. None of this is technically difficult. All of it is politically hard, because it requires the people who benefit from the current structure to dismantle it. Until that happens, policy design will keep producing behaviour that disappoints its designers, not because the policies are wrong, but because the rewards are.

From Constraint to Adaptation

Nigeria’s history matters. Colonial rule, extractive institutions, oil dependence, federal allocation and patronage politics have all shaped the country’s path. They explain many of the constraints within which Nigeria operates. But constraints are not verdicts. The dangerous conclusion is not that history matters; it is that history decides.

Yuen Yuen Ang’s contribution is to show that development is not a fixed sequence of reforms to be copied from rich countries to poor ones. It is an adaptive process. Countries move by starting with what they have, testing what works, rewarding what succeeds and building institutions through use rather than declaration. The lesson from China is not that Nigeria should imitate China. It is that transformation begins when a society recovers the confidence to act within its own realities.

For Nigeria, the question is therefore no longer what the country lacks. It has variation. It has entrepreneurial energy. It has commercial traditions, cultural resilience and emerging regional niches. What it lacks most is a disciplined system of selection. This system entails a clear definition of national success, incentives that reward production over distribution, and institutions that allow learning to accumulate rather than evaporate with each political cycle.

This is where leadership earns its keep. Not leadership as command and control, nor leadership as the next grand plan, but leadership as the catalyst that changes what the system rewards. Nigeria does not need a perfect blueprint before it begins. It needs a credible direction, a culture that prizes evidence and useful knowledge, and a political economy that rewards states, firms, schools and public institutions for solving real problems rather than for outlasting them.

The past has drawn a circle around Nigeria. It has not closed the future. Within that circle there is still room for agency—room to free the mind from deference, despair and imported certainty; room to turn variation into experimentation, niches into productive specialisation, and ambition into measurable progress. The pauper in Ang’s parable is paralysed because both his advisers tell him to start with what he does not have. The trick, it turns out, is to start with what he does. Nigeria has more to work with than it gives itself credit for. The work of building the machinery that turns it into something belongs to Nigerians.

Reprinted with permission by Nextier. Original post here.

Learn More

• For Ang's broader paradigm, read her essay on AIM — Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy at Oxford Development Studies

• Big‑picture: Read Ang’s essay on why breakdown of the old order can be a moment of polytunity rather than paralysis
  

• Mahmood Sonday (Managing Director, Reos Partners)

• Akanimo Andrew Akpan (CEO, AlgoViva)

that I found especially gratifying and generative.

What struck me is that each reader amplified a different branch of AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy (of which APE is one pillar).

Decolonizing is A Prerequisite for Systems Change

Mahmood Sonday underscored the decolonizing dimension of AIM.

That category error [of mistaking complex for complicated] isn't innocent. Drawing on Edward Said, Ang shows its layered with colonial assumption: that 'development' means converging toward an idealised West.

This line threw a strong punch:

'moving the centre' from Western norms is a prerequisite, not a postscript, for systems change

Just last week, I shared a similar point at JHU’s Future of Foreign Aid Forum on 5 May 2025. Foreign aid was built on a structurally unequal foundation. And unless policymakers recognize this past and move beyond the assumption of U.S. and Western primacy, they can’t meaningfully adapt aid practices for multipolar world.

His words also articulate a constant frustration of mine: the false neutrality of complexity and systems thinking. We can’t actually think adaptively and draw on diverse ideas until we recognize the pervasiveness of Western-centrism in virtually every subject—and particularly in development and political economy.

In a moment when so many of our inherited frameworks are visibly failing, Ang’s adaptive, inclusive, and moral political economy feels timely.

Yes, inherited frameworks.

The way I’ve put it: “Our reality is rapidly changing, but our paradigm is still stuck in the last century, shaped by the global institutions and norms of that era.”

My student Ambre Clermont expresses it compellingly from a Gen-Z perspective: “The anxiety [about the polycrisis] doesn’t come only from the world being unstable. It comes from being trained for stability in a world that never operated that way.”

Avoiding the Trap of “Complexifying Complexity”

Akanimo Andrew Akpan (CEO of AlgoViva) precisely articulated and warned against another danger, which he calls “intellectual fog.” I use a more colloquial expression: Yoda Talk—using complexity jargon to make bulls**t sound profound.

What I appreciate in Yuen Yuen Ang’s framing is that she avoids the two traps that often appear in conversations about complexity.

The first is acknowledging complexity, only to flatten it into neat simplifications that feel more manageable, controllable, and appealing.

The second is turning complexity into intellectual fog, where complexity becomes an excuse for abstraction, paralysis, or endless theorising without orientation for action. I call this "complexifying complexity".

De-Mechanizing & De-Colonizing

Through Adaptive Political Economy (APE) and my empirical work on development, I try to follow the principle of simple but not any simpler.

Complexity does not simply mean “the world is messy” and leave it there.

Nor does it mean forcing non-linear realities into linear models.

It means social scientists must do the hard work of inventing an entire paradigm—an operating system—from concepts and methods to data collection and theory, in order to illuminate the hidden order of complexity. That, in turn, provides a knowledge foundation for 21st-century practitioners grappling with disruption and uncertainty.

My theory of coevolutionary development is one modest effort, just one among many other possibilities. It de-mechanizes (replacing linear theories with a three-step coevolutionary model), while also de-colonizing (challenging normative assumptions that “good institutions” necessarily resemble those found in America or Denmark).

From experience, I know this kind of work is hard—even punishing in the beginning.

Yet doubling down on traditional mechanical, Western-centric models, while pretending the world is not changing, is not a long-term solution either.

I can’t make myself ignore obsolescence. Can you?

I’m sharing both responses below, followed by a simple map—courtesy of AI—tracing where the three threads branched and where they converged again.

Note: Also, long overdue, big shout out to Ken Opalo for quoting APE in his brilliant Substack, An Africanist Perspective.

We’re sharing a Spanish-language post by Israel Alcázar, co-founder of Thinking With You, who authored “De la poli-crisis a la politurnidad.”

Alcázar takes Yuen Yuen Ang’s polytunity and AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) paradigm not only across languages, but also to his professional field: making organisations nimble for an age of disruption.

Responding to Ang’s DSA Keynote Lecture, “From Polycrisis to Polytunity,” Alcázar agrees that “complaining” about polycrisis isn’t much use. Below, we quote translations from Alcázar’s post.

It seems we can’t go a day without someone mentioning the word “crisis.” It’s the buzzword to describe this multifaceted chaos we live in: climate crisis, economic instability, technological disruption, social tension.

Poly-crisis. All at once.

To be honest, this situation makes you want to bury your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass. Complaining is the favorite pastime.

But what if we’re giving too much prominence to the apocalypse?

Turning the tables through polytunity, he notes, “isn’t a play on words,” rather it is an “interesting change of perspective,” with actionable implications.

Yuen Yuen Ang proposes turning the tables. She coins the term “Polytunity” as the constructive opposite of polycrisis. And no, it’s not a play on words from a self-help book; it’s a rather interesting change of perspective.

Ang’s thesis is that the term “polycrisis” (popularized by the World Economic Forum and Adam Tooze) is Eurocentric. It reflects the fear of Western elites in the face of converging threats (climate change, inequality, conflict), but offers neither a diagnosis nor solutions. For the “Global South” and marginalized groups, living amidst crises has been the norm, not an apocalyptic novelty.

The underlying reflection is that this very moment of multiple crises is, in reality, a historic opportunity to rethink the foundations of how we develop.

Then Alcázar goes further to make polytunity practical for his community. Writing for managers, teams, and founders, he observes how Ang’s AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) logic can be applied to reforming organizations: directed improvisation over control, systems change over patchwork fixes, and quick adaptation over crisis reaction. Polytunity becomes something you do, not something you debate.

In his words:

Ang proposes a new form of development called AIM :

Adaptive: Replace linear/mechanical thinking with systemic thinking . Societies are complex systems, not complicated ones (like a tree, not a toaster). There is order in complexity, and science should seek it rather than simplify it.

Inclusive: Development begins with the principle of “using what you have.” Innovation doesn’t come only from elites or foreign experts, but from local actors reusing indigenous practices and resources.

Morality: Recognizing that power shapes ideas. Objectivity is not neutrality, but rather being transparent about the dynamics of power and values.

I’m bringing this directly to my field: organizations. Many companies are experiencing their own version of a polycrisis. The market is putting pressure on them, technology is overtaking them, talent isn’t as committed as before, and old management styles are no longer effective. The usual temptation is to dig in, cut back, and pray that everything goes back to “the way it was.”

But organizational “politeness” is something else entirely. It’s understanding that this pressure is the perfect excuse to do what, perhaps, we should have done long ago. It’s time to question management from top to bottom, to commit to the genuine autonomy of teams, and to build resilience based not on enduring blows, but on adapting quickly. It’s the opportunity to stop patching things up and finally talk about the structure.

Now contrast polytunity with Mark Leonard’s (Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations) report on the “exhausting and bewildering” mood at the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Conference in Davos on the polycrisis.

This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was even more exhausting and bewildering than usual. Politicians love to say that you should never let a crisis go to waste, but even they seemed overwhelmed by a conference agenda that aimed to capture the full sweep of today’s “polycrisis.”... It is no surprise that people are anxious… We often complain that the politicians, business leaders, and diplomats who huddle annually in Davos are out of touch with everyday people. But in today’s attention economy, they are just as confused as the people they are meant to represent.

Resonating messages like Alcázar’s matter because polytunity is designed to be global. The agenda scales when it enters new languages, professions, and lived realities—especially outside elite policy forums. To borrow his words: Which side are you on?

On the side of those who describe chaos as lamentable, or on the side of those who seize the opportunity to redesign and evolve?

We share an excerpt from Alcázar’s Spanish newsletter below.

Reposted from “De la poli‑crisis a la politurnidad”, 20 December, 2025

Parece que no podemos pasar un día sin que alguien mencione la palabra crisis. Es la palabra de moda para describir este caos múltiple en el que vivimos: crisis climática, inestabilidad económica, disrupción tecnológica, tensión social.

Poli-crisis. Todo a la vez.

Un panorama que invita, siendo honestos, a meter la cabeza debajo del ala y esperar a que pase el chaparrón. El lamento como deporte favorito.

Pero, ¿y si le estamos dando demasiado protagonismo al apocalipsis? La académica Yuen Yuen Ang propone darle la vuelta a la tortilla. Ella acuña el término “Politunidad” (Polytunity) como el opuesto constructivo a la policrisis. Y no, no es un juego de palabras sacado de un libro de autoayuda; es un cambio de gafas cuanto menos interesante.

La tesis de Ang es que el término “policrisis” (popularizado por el Foro Económico Mundial y Adam Tooze) es eurocéntrico. Refleja el miedo de las élites occidentales ante la convergencia de amenazas (cambio climático, desigualdad, conflicto), pero no ofrece un diagnóstico ni soluciones. Para el “Sur Global” y los grupos marginados, vivir entre crisis ha sido la norma, no una novedad apocalíptica.

La reflexión que hay detrás es que este mismo momento de múltiples crisis es, en realidad, una oportunidad histórica para repensar los fundamentos de cómo nos desarrollamos.

Cuando los sistemas que dábamos por sentados empiezan a gripar, no queda otra que mirar la maquinaria. Y ahí, en ese desmontaje forzoso, es donde surge la oportunidad de rediseñar. Es el “nunca desaproveches una buena crisis” elevado a la máxima potencia.

Ang propone una nueva forma de desarrollo llamada AIM:

Adaptativa (Adaptive): Reemplazar el pensamiento lineal/mecánico por el pensamiento sistémico. Las sociedades son sistemas complejos, no complicados (como un árbol, no como una tostadora). Hay orden en la complejidad, y la ciencia debe buscarlo en lugar de simplificarlo.

Inclusiva (Inclusive): El desarrollo empieza con el principio de “usar lo que tienes”. La innovación no viene solo de élites o expertos extranjeros, sino de actores locales reutilizando prácticas y recursos indígenas.

Moral (Moral): Reconocer que el poder moldea las ideas. La objetividad no es neutralidad, sino ser transparente sobre las dinámicas de poder y valores.

Llevo esto directamente a mi terreno, el de las organizaciones. Muchas empresas viven su propia versión de la policrisis. El mercado les aprieta, la tecnología les adelanta por la derecha, el talento no se compromete como antes y las viejas formas de gestionar ya no mueven el barco. La tentación habitual es atrincherarse, recortar y rezar para que todo vuelva a ser “como antes”.

Pero la “politunidad” organizacional es otra cosa. Es entender que esta presión es la excusa perfecta para hacer lo que, quizás, debimos hacer hace tiempo. Es el momento de cuestionar el management de arriba a abajo, de apostar por la autonomía real de los equipos y de construir una resiliencia que no se base en aguantar golpes, sino en adaptarse rápido. Es la oportunidad de dejar de poner parches y hablar, por fin, de la estructura.

El ruido de la policrisis es ensordecedor, sí. Pero la “politunidad” exige que nos pongamos los auriculares de la acción. Nos obliga a dejar de lamentarnos por los fundamentos que se agrietan y nos invita a ser quienes construyen los nuevos.

Y tu, ¿en qué lado estás? ¿En el de los que describen el caos como lameto o en el de los que aprovechan la oportunidad para rediseñar y evolucionar?

Note: As Polytunity circulates in Spanish, it appears under multiple translations. In the post shared here, Israel Alcázar uses politurnidad. Other Spanish translations include poliunidad, used in Listín Diario, and politunidad, used in Perfil.

Learn more about Israel Alcazar

• El futuro es ayer – Israel’s Spanish newsletter on the future of work and organisations

Learn more about Polytunity

• Listen to Ang’s DSA Keynote “From Polytunity to Polycrisis”

• Read her latest op-ed at Project Syndicate: The World Order After 2025

Glossary

• Polycrisis

• Polytunity

• AIM

I’m sharing these responses from to my essay “Polytunity: The Future of Development” (The Ideas Letter, 4 September, 2025) because they do something genuinely precious: they place polytunity in dialogue with my academic hero, Albert O. Hirschman — the unorthodox economist whose ideas about adaptive development were far ahead of his time.

Ang’s critique of development economics is devastating… Against this, Ang proposes studying development as coevolutionary rather than linear. Development doesn’t begin with perfect institutions that enable growth or growth that enables institutions. It begins with “using what you have”… This is where Albert O. Hirschman becomes newly relevant.

But in 2025, Hirschman’s worldview should no longer feel futuristic. It is exactly what we need in an era of deep transformation.

Rajesh Kasturirangan is a mathematician, systems thinker, and co-founder of the Socratus Foundation for Collective Wisdom. Across two posts, he situates my line of thinking - Polytunity, AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy, and How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016 book that seeded AIM) - within a longer, larger intellectual lineage on complexity and diverse pathways to development.

Below are excerpts from both posts.

Excerpt 1: Daily Planet (9 Sep 2025)

Polycrisis has been the term-du-jour for a few years now, ever since Adam Tooze reintroduced it into the global lexicon. I have critiqued it on many an occasion, claiming our condition is more of Polyconflict (just think how the US, China, Russia and India are mutual frenemies these days!) than of Polycrisis.

In today’s Daily Planet, Yuen Yuen Ang has a different take, focusing on the possibilities inherent within crisis, and saying we are in the condition of Polytunity.

Ang’s essay on Polytunity introduces a transformative perspective on the convergence of global crises, challenging the prevailing notion of “polycrisis.” While polycrisis has become a popular term to describe the overwhelming and interconnected challenges facing the world, it tends to abstract and naturalize these problems, often reflecting a Eurocentric and establishment-friendly viewpoint that leads to paralysis rather than action. In contrast, “polytunity,” a term coined to reframe disruption as a unique opportunity for deep transformation, calls for a shift in how we understand and respond to global challenges.

If we are in a time of monsters, an interregnum, then we also have the opportunity to rethink the foundations of our existence.

The letter critiques the traditional development paradigm rooted in colonial and industrial logics, which treats societies mechanistically and imposes Western templates as universal solutions. Instead, it advocates for AIM—Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy—which embraces complexity, values diverse, context-specific approaches, and acknowledges power asymmetries in knowledge production. Development is seen as a coevolutionary, nonlinear process where societies build on existing, sometimes imperfect institutions through indigenous innovation and creative adaptation.

“Polytunity” urges a collective effort to build new research agendas and policy frameworks that prioritize the experiences and innovations of the global majority, moving beyond fear and paralysis toward constructive, inclusive transformation. It is a call to rethink development and global cooperation in a multipolar, disrupted world.

Excerpt 2: Ranganaut Newsletter (17 Sep 2025)

“…Which brings us to polycrisis—or as Yuen Yuen Ang brilliantly reframes it, polytunity. The term polycrisis has become, as she notes, “the apocalyptic buzzword of the decade,” a way for elites to name their fears without challenging the systems that created them. It abstracts causes, making crises appear as natural convergences rather than systemic outcomes of extractive orders. Polytunity, by contrast, sees disruption as opportunity for transformation—not just of institutions but of paradigms themselves.

Ang’s critique of development economics is devastating. The field has been trapped in what she calls the industrial-colonial paradigm: treating societies as machines with buttons to push while assuming Western templates are universal endpoints. The recent Nobel prizes exemplify this—one for breaking poverty into “smaller, more manageable” problems via randomized controlled trials (as if any society escaped poverty through precisely measured nudges), another for claiming settler colonialism brought prosperity through “inclusive institutions” (conveniently forgetting the slavery and extraction part).

Against this, Ang proposes studying development as coevolutionary rather than linear. Development doesn’t begin with perfect institutions that enable growth or growth that enables institutions. It begins with “using what you have”—repurposing weak, wrong, or unorthodox means to build new markets, which then stimulate modern institutions. What works for start-up economies isn’t what works for advanced ones. China didn’t develop by importing Western best practices but by creatively adapting existing arrangements that looked backward by first-world standards.

This is where Albert O. Hirschman becomes newly relevant, as Daniel Drezner suggests. Hirschman rejected both the universalism of neoliberalism and the grand designs of Big Push development. He embraced unbalanced growth, believing bottlenecks would create pressure for reform. He advocated eclecticism, localism, and what he called “a propensity to self-subversion”—a recognition that every approach contains the seeds of its own failure.

Learn More about Rajesh Kasturirangan

• Follow Rajesh on Substack, X, BlueSky, or The Daily Planet, where he writes with uncommon clarity about a world in profound transition.

Learn More About Polytunity

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

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

Glossary

• Polytunity

• AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy