AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is a new paradigm created by Yuen Yuen Ang for a disrupted, multipolar world, which includes both analytic and normative shifts. The default “industrial-colonial” paradigm in political economy, created during and for the 18th-20th centuries, is long past its expiration date. That historical chapter brought material and social progress through the spread of modernization, but it has also led humanity to the “polycrisis” in the 2020s.

Designed for today’s Age of Disruption, AIM reshapes the way we study political economies through a unique blend of three pillars: Adaptive = replace machine-thinking with systems-thinking. Inclusive = replace one-size-fits-all Western templates with a diversity of local solutions and pathways. Moral = replace feigned neutrality with awareness of how power and positionality shapes ideas.

AIM integrates but transcends its source literatures. First, it draws on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theories, but calls out on the field’s Western-centric orientation. In reality, CAS concepts were already present in many non-Western philosophies. Second, AIM is inspired by decolonizing discourses, but it does not merely stop at critiques. Rather, AIM advances and practices a different kind of social science, for example, by tracing causality (such as the process of socio-economic modernization) and measuring core concepts (such as corruption) differently. Third, tapping from anthropology, AIM applies the lens of positionality and the politics of knowledge production to expose normative biases hidden in ostensibly “objective” social theories and metrics - and crucially, takes concrete steps to redress them.

Ang had already applied Adaptive + Inclusive + Moral principles throughout her earlier, award-winning books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), well before naming AIM in 2024. However, as both books had “China” on the cover, they were often perceived as China-specific case studies. By contrast, case studies on Sweden or even 17th-century England are assumed to generate universal theories. In reality, Ang’s books advanced new concepts, categories, and paradigms that can apply anywhere, as sophisticated readers recognize.

AIM in Practice - How China Escaped the Poverty Trap: In this book, Ang rejected the mechanical worldview and instead applied a complex systems lens to development. She exposes three major schools for their theoretical dead ends (growth first, good institutions first, good histories first), then introduces her approach: studying socio-economic development as a coevolutionary - not linear - process, marked by a recursive feedback loop (Adaptive). Rejecting the assumption that growth-supporting institutions follow a single idealized Western template, she showed that market-building institutions looked and functioned differently from market-preserving ones. This is true not only in China’s experience, but also in actual Western histories, not the partial “fairy tales” taught in textbooks (Inclusive). Thus, the book shined a light on double standards, asking why educated society readily assumes the generalizability of theories based on 17th century England, while insisting that those on China “can’t travel” beyond its borders (Moral).

AIM in Practice - China’s Gilded Age: Growing directly out of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, this second book applies AIM to decolonize corruption studies. It challenges the popular belief that corruption afflicts only poor countries, whereas rich and mostly Western societies are clean and marked by “good governance.” This impression is reinforced by global metrics of corruption and canonical narratives in political economy. Unbundling corruption into four distinct types - and spotlighting “access money” (a variety that can be found in wealthy democracies) - Ang highlights the evolving quality of corruption over time (Adaptive). Challenging the perception of “Chinese exceptionalism,” it shows that the Chinese pairing of corruption and growth is not opposite to Western paths, but rather remarkably similar to America’s Gilded Age in the 19th century (Inclusive). In these ways, Ang exposes the normative biases that are built into global metrics and narratives, and then corrects them with more rigorous alternatives (Moral).

Why didn’t Ang name AIM explicitly in the past? A major reason: she wouldn’t have been allowed to. Even today, she still often encounters a wall of resistance, dismissal, and scorn. Look at the Halls of Global Canons. How many women of color can you count?

That is precisely why Ang champions AIM as a holistic paradigm with Adaptive, Inclusive, and Moral pillars. Those who mourn the limits of industrial control and Western decline see the present times as “polycrisis.” But Ang doesn’t see it this way, because she is perched on the margins of the establishment - close enough to know how it operates, far enough to recognize its blind spots. From her vantage, disruptions bring polytunity.