AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) political economy: introduction and applications

The polycrisis marks a moment of global disruption, but it also opens a rare opportunity for intellectual transformation – what Yuen Yuen Ang calls polytunity. This essay introduces AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy as a paradigm designed for a disrupted, multipolar world. AIM replaces the industrial-colonial worldview that has long shaped political economy, challenging its mechanical assumptions, Eurocentric benchmarks, and claims of neutrality. AIM did not emerge recently; its core ideas and applications were already present in Ang’s 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.” Drawing on How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Ang demonstrates AIM in action: development as a coevolutionary process in complex economic systems, and meta-institutions as higher-order designs that enable state-market coevolution. The essay concludes by situating AIM as a generative research paradigm – one whose roots lie in past work and whose canopy extends across ongoing projects in comparative corruption, fiscal capacity, and policy communication. AIM not only offers a compass for the current age of disruption, it extends an invitation to collectively build a more adaptive, pluralistic, and reflexive political economy.