Theoretical analysis reveals pathways to overcome crises in development via enhanced productivity and political cohesion.
This paper provides a unified structural diagnosis of involution and the middle-income trap, both conceptualized as manifestations of an "upper-limit crisis" within the frameworks of the Community Cohesion Model and the Political Philosophy Cohesion Model. It argues that the fundamental pathway to breaking these crises is a leap in productivity, and that the prerequisite for an endogenous productivity leap is the complete cohesion of a political philosophy—specifically, that values (ritual) provide positive incentives and sacred narratives for technological exploration, methodology theorizes practical experience, and political tools (warfare) provide institutional safeguards for innovation, with all three dimensions deriving from the same philosophical matrix. Neither materialism nor idealism is a necessary condition. The paper validates this thesis through five philosophical paths and a four-tier comparative framework of industrialization trajectories, demonstrating why technology transfer can bring short-term growth but cannot sustain endogenous upgrading when political philosophy is incomplete or hybridized.
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鑫培 骆 (2026) studied this question.
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