Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. A central theme in Ang’s work is how societies adapt, or fail to adapt, to disruptions—beginning with China’s capitalist revolution and extending to multipolarity and artificial intelligence. She is appointed at the SNF Agora Institute and Center for Economy and Society, a multidisciplinary program established to find alternatives to traditional economic thinking. Ang’s cross-disciplinary research has received awards across political science, economics, and sociology, with prize committees recognizing it for advancing “game-changing” and “field-shifting” ideas.

Ang argues that we cannot tackle 21st-century disruptions using paradigms inherited from the 20th century. Rather than mourning the current moment as “polycrisis,” she reframes it as polytunity: a rare opening for deep transformation, beginning with how we see and think. Her response is AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, and Moral) Political Economy—a system of thinking that centers complex systems, pluralistic solutions, and power awareness. AIM formalizes ideas developed across Ang’s scholarship, especially her award-winning books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), and continues to generate work on the emerging world order, human-AI co-creation, and China’s economic paradox. Her research applying LLMs to study policy communication under complexity is supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation.

Known for translating complex debates into accessible insights for global audiences, Ang is frequently invited to speak at academic, business, and policy forums worldwide. Recent engagements include the Carnegie Endowment, Development Leadership Dialogue at SOAS, Development Studies Association, IMF, UNDP, and the World Economic Forum.

To learn more about Ang’s work, visit her website: https://www.yuenyuenang.org.