Jean Drèze studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex and did his PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.  He has taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics, and is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University, Jharkhand. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public policy, with special reference to India. His research interests include rural development, social inequality, elementary education, child nutrition, health care, food security, employment guarantee and economic democracy. His books include Hunger and Public Action (with Amartya Sen, 1989), An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (with Amartya Sen, 2013) and Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone (2017). Drèze is also active in various campaigns for economic and social rights in India.

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Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China's Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as "game-changing." Her scholarship has received multiple awards across disciplines: political science, economics, and sociology. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics,” in addition to the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), and Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics). The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) produced a 7-part video series featuring her work, “The Economics of China,” which is available on YouTube. Apolitical in the UK named her among the world's "100 Most Influential Academics in Government," based on nominations from policymakers and civil servants. She has been featured in prominent outlets including Freakonomics Radio, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times. She received her PhD from Stanford University. 

Title: Adaptive Political Economy: Toward a New Paradigm 

The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This treatment has driven political economists to oversimplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether. In development, this has led to theoretical dead ends, trivial agendas, or failed public policies. This article proposes an alternative paradigm: adaptive political economy. It recognizes that social systems are complex, not complicated; complexity can be ordered, not messy; and social scientists should be developing the concepts, methods, and theories to illuminate the order of complexity, rather than oversimplifying it. The author illustrates one application of adaptive political economy by mapping the coevolution of economic and institutional change. This approach yields fresh, important conclusions that mechanical, linear models of development have missed, including that market-building institutions look and function differently from market-sustaining ones.

To shape the discussion, read the open access article here. Further reading a review of the essay by Suyash Rai at Carnegie India and an earlier response by Duncan Green at LSE.