In Yuen Yuen Ang’s critique, mechanical thinking is ill-suited to complex societies because it strips away the inherent realities of multiple causation, feedback loops, and emergence.

In Yuen Yuen Ang’s analysis, while polycrisis names the convergence of crises, it does not diagnose their root causes or provide solutions.

Industrial–Colonial Paradigm describes the dominant worldview that emerged in the eighteenth century alongside industrialization and colonial expansion and continues to shape political economy into the early twenty-first century.

Yuen Yuen Ang interprets the World Order After 2025 not as polycrisis or great-power dominance, but as polytunity—a generational opening for deep transformation of global institutions and thought within a multipolar context.

Fairy Tales of Western Development is a decolonizing critique of idealized narratives that attribute Western development primarily to political liberalism or “good institutions.”

Adaptive Fiscal Capacity refers to the ability of a government to generate, manage, and adapt its portfolio of financial resources—tax and taxless alike—in response to evolving conditions.

Polytunity reframes the current era of global disruption as a generational opening for deep, constructive transformation, in contrast to the fear-driven, Eurocentric framing of polycrisis.

A paradigm is a system of thought grounded in core assumptions about the nature of societies that determines what questions are asked and what kinds of concepts, theories, and methods are used.

Adaptive Political Economy (APE) is a paradigm for developing theories and methods that illuminate complex social features, such as adaptation and coevolution, rather than simplifying them away.

AIM redefines core assumptions of political economy for a disrupted, multipolar world, replacing the industrial–colonial worldview with a systems-based, pluralistic, and reflexive approach.