AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy

Written By Yuen Yuen Ang

Term

AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy

Citable Version (DOI): http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5624950

Idea level

Paradigm

Definition

AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral Political Economy is a paradigm proposed by Yuen Yuen Ang in 2025 that redefines core assumptions of political economy for a disrupted, multipolar world, replacing the outdated industrial–colonial paradigm with a systems-based, pluralistic, and reflexive approach. It integrates three pillars: Adaptive (societies are complex systems, not machines), Inclusive (multiple development pathways exist beyond Western benchmarks), and Moral (objectivity requires confronting how power and positionality shape knowledge).

Sources

Node reference page:

  • Ang, Y.Y. (2025) “AIM: Adaptive, Inclusive & Moral.” Webpage on Ang’s official website. [Link]

Formal articulation:

Earlier articulation (AIM introduced but not in title):

Empirical foundation (AIM applied not yet named)

Genealogy

[Concept] The historical moment: Polytunity defines why we need a new paradigm—AIM—in a disrupted, multipolar world. (In contrast: Polycrisis as Eurocentric and fear-naming)

[Paradigm] AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy is a paradigm—a generative system of thought—grounded in three integrated assumptions:

→ [Pillar] Adaptive: societies are complex systems, not machines

→ [Pillar] Inclusive: multiple development pathways exist beyond Western benchmarks

→ [Pillar] Moral: objectivity requires confronting power and positionality in knowledge production

[Application] Earlier work seeded and applied AIM to reframe development, governance, corruption, and even US-China relations without naming AIM (e.g., How China Escaped the Poverty Trap [2016]; Beyond Weber [2017]; China’s Gilded Age [2020]; Clash of Two Gilded Ages [2023])

[Application] Ongoing: AIM applied across domains, including unbundling corruption, adaptive policy communication, reinterpreting Western fiscal history, multipolarity, human-AI collaboration.

Quotes

“Adaptive political economy must incorporate an inclusive and moral dimension—making it, collectively, an adaptive, inclusive, and moral (AIM) political economy—that honestly recognizes the inequities that have molded the way we think, see, and approach the world.”

— Ang, Adaptive Political Economy (2024)

“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… 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.” 

— Ang, Polytunity (2025)

“Polytunity begins with a simple insight: we cannot tackle 21st-century challenges with 20th-century mental models. Yet much of political-economic thinking still relies on what I call the industrial–colonial paradigm, a mindset inherited from the 18th to 20th centuries… When the industrial-colonial paradigm is translated into practice, it tends to produce distorting and disempowering results.”

“When everything is suddenly upended, it can be a polytunity rather than calamity—we’re forced to go beyond patchwork solutions and redesign systems from the ground up. In this context, switching from neoliberalism to industrial policies is fashionable but not enough. For a deeper intellectual revolution, I advance AIM, a way of thought I’ve been developing and practicing for decades—and now formally name.”

“If the industrial-colonial paradigm underpinned a bygone era of mass industrialization and Western domination, AIM is the new paradigm I’m proposing for a disrupted, multipolar world… A paradigm determines what questions we ask, what methods we use, and what actions we take. For a simple analogy, think of it as the operating system on your computing devices. If you change the OS, all the apps must change with it.”

“A paradigm is more than a theory: an explanation for a particular problem. It certainly isn’t just a ‘framework’ (which can mean a list of points or a convoluted diagram that doesn’t explain anything). As a paradigm, AIM is founded on three generative assumptions, each forming a pillar: Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral. Importantly, these three pillars operate together as a system, like sunlight, water, and soil.

  • Without APE, we misrepresent social complexity.

  • Without IPE, we suppress social diversity.

  • Without MPE, we obscure the positionality of the observer.”

“AIM did not emerge recently; its core ideas and applications were already present in my earlier books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), but misclassified due to structural erasure that confine non-Western scholarship to the realm of ‘exceptional cases.’”

“In this sense, AIM is a living intellectual forest whose seeds were planted long ago and whose canopy continues to expand across projects and collaborations.”

— Ang, AIM: Introduction & Applications (2026)

“AIM is a different way of doing social science and development. If practiced seriously, AIM changes the questions we ask, the methods we use, the data we collect, and the answers we consider possible. It takes a lot of effort, but such effort is essential if we want to adapt to a disrupted, multipolar world, where the industrial-colonial paradigm has definitively expired.” (p. 6)

“To seize that polytunity, I offer AIM, not as a blueprint, but as a compass… It is an invitation for others to build, extend, and transform this paradigm in ways I cannot yet imagine.” (p. 6-7)

— Ang, Keynote: From Polycrisis to Polytunity (2026)

Concept Constellation

Across Ang’s work, AIM consistently co-appears with the following concepts and analytic themes:

Yuen Yuen Ang https://www.yuenyuenang.org
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