If the policy recommendation for the U.S. is just to spread awareness of the problem to get people excited about building, which then leads to a momentary political coalition that permits a once in a century buildout which ceases once a critical mass of people feel harmed, isn’t that just how the American socio-political system normally works? Even if the US’s history as a civilization is not long relative to other societies, we already have enough data to make out the contours of a cycle.
On the other hand, who knows what a Leninist developmental state with Chinese characteristics will do once its primary reason to exist (rapid development) becomes impossible due to the iron laws of economics? A bureaucratized perpetual revolution seems like a decent proposal for a solution given the CCP’s ideological and historical context, but it remains to be seen whether this will work in the long run.
Although it retains many imperial legacies, the PRC marks a firm break with the past and the history most relevant to guessing what the future may bring to China is even shorter than the U.S.’s. And the lovely thing about an unconstrained centralized corporatist state is that the stakes of “getting it to work” are extremely high, since the party’s failure is everyone’s failure and replacing leaders to get a do-over is not a pretty process.
Meanwhile, when the American developmental state goes into dormancy, the worst that happens is bridges start to rust and pipes leak, leading to complaints and political mobilization, a targeted buildout, and then it goes back into dormancy. Dan Wang relied on vibes of American doomerism and eternal Chinese global hegemony on the horizon to raise the stakes for the U.S., which is understandable given the need to spread awareness. However, in this bilateral comparison, the most obvious difference is unconstrained executive power and I fear increasingly many Americans are taking inspiration from that rather than the actual tactical problem of our built environments.
We’re Americans, nobody is coming to save us but ourselves. We should be angry that we aren’t building, and not because we have a weak state and effete leaders, but because as free people we will not stand for cracked roads and decrepit buildings. The decision to build is public and gathering a sufficiently large coalition requires public education, persuasion, horse trading, maybe a touch of bullying, etc.
In short, my personal sense is that the U.S. actually gets a lot right about its system. Based on Jonathon’s review I believe that the path forward is not to redesign our state and society from the ground up, but to just do politics: pass laws, fund building projects, and relax regulations. Discouraging people from becoming lawyers would not be the most effective use of our effort. Then regarding China, it has done a lot right but the design of its system is still unsettled…and the stakes are troublingly high.
Thoughts welcome and Jonathon rocks for interrogating this book so rigorously.
Well said! Enjoyed reading these thoughts. I came away from writing this piece more optimistic for America's future. One of the key reasons I favor liberalism as political system and philosophy is that it aims to min-max downside risk, i.e., solve the bad emperor problem. We may not always get optimal or even good outcomes, but we should rarely if ever get catastrophically bad ones. Relatedly, a good way to see the benefits of America's constrained executive is in contrast with the area where America's executive is least constrained: foreign policy. For all the regrettable activity we've gotten up to abroad in recent decades, I would contend the critical enabler is precisely that this is the area where liberal checks on power are least potent.
For your point "executive agencies are probably staffed by a greater share of engineers, technocrats, and non-lawyer professional managerial personnel (though this is speculation)."
I'm working on a piece on this—your speculation is, I think, mistaken. For instance, at USDA in the early 1900s, the agency directors (i.e., the people running agencies reporting directly to the secretary) had fairly elite technical backgrounds. About 2/3s of them had graduate degrees in their fields, such as chemistry, entomology, etc. Today, that's unimaginable. It's all politicians with law degrees.
USDA was an unusually technical department, but it common across the board to have engineers or scientists running agencies. The engineering-to-lawyer mindset shift 100% happened in the US.
This is just quibbling with an excellent piece, of course!
No this is great! Happy to update my priors (and amend the essay with a link to your piece). I’d be very curious if it’s possible to get a time series on agency director backgrounds.
Well, I need to finish writing the piece and get it published, is the first step! I would definitely like such a time series but it's laborious. I only checked for a single department for a single year, and I had to look up their biographies elsewhere. I don't think the feds kept records on it.
In line with your prior writings, this is the best synthesis of the "discourse" out there at the moment.
The more structural part of US "checks and balances" leading to lawyerly instincts that don't exist in the Chinese state structure seems to be the best summation of Dan's thesis (even if he doesn't quite make the connection you do between them).
Also enjoyed the travelogue, meeting people writeup at the start of this! Great writing and interactions.
Thanks for the kind words! Dan does have a great sentence somewhere (or perhaps he said it on a podcast) of the Declaration of Independence being a supremely lawyerly document, so I would be happy to note that Dan does draw the historical through-line as well. I just wanted to put my own gloss on it.
Outstanding piece. I enjoyed Breakneck but I found lots of this useful. If this is the standard of public “disagreement” we have, the future is super bright!
I have only one very minor quibble - pursuing zero covid is what I would expect from an “engineering state” and not a vaccination of the elderly for the simple reason that vaccination would have meant setting people free and not “controlling the virus”.
very kind and thoughtful, thank you Feyi. Fair quibble. One man's Platonic "engineering state" may choose a different optimization function than another's!
Maybe this will sound like gen z defeatism, but as far as discussion of "what does this mean for the future?", I can't help but think that all this atoms business (with the exception of energy) will be overshadowed by bits (AI bits)...unless politics starts dropping bombs (physical) to bring things back to the classical/natural/economic/anthropological laws of history.
Doesn't sound like that all, it's a very valid axis of debate. Personally, I don't know if my status as a millennial (1994) influences my moderate pro-atom tilt, or maybe a bit of a grass is greener thinking on my part. Whatever the case, in truth I think it's much less a rigid binary and more a dialectic. Perhaps the future techno-utopia will reflect beautiful synthesis?
Myself coming from gen x cusp (79) I was only appropriating gen z there. While I also suspect a synthesis, I think it may be some weird butterfly effect synthesis of very sci-fi-y unknown unknowns, not of the big old categories like guns/germs/steel/atoms/bits.
What remains unaddressed is if the US actually needs more engineering of the giant public works kind. You can have an overbuilt infrastructure like Japan which keeps building expensive modern roads to abandoned mountain villages.
I am interested in reading a more fleshed out treatment about idea that today's American malaise has antecedents from well before the movements of the late 60s and 70s. I am not really sure that I agree, but it is an interesting counterpoint to the zeitgeist.
If that was the case, wouldn't the UK be a good counterpoint? It at least used to be a famously centralized country with no codified check of Parliamentary power, and yet they have encountered many of the same problems. Although the UK also has a strong legal tradition.
Perhaps the way to thread the needle is that the latent structure for obstruction and vetocracy was more present in the American tradition than in other countries, but it wasn't well harnessed until 60 years ago?
Interesting piece throughout. I loved the China analysis.
> a succession of statist presidents (Teddy, Wilson, FDR) largely under the pressures of the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Depression, and World War II.
The Spanish-American War was fought under McKinley. Teddy Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency after McKinley was assassinated, by which time Spain had been defeated.
I think we can still subscribe Pettis on this and regard all this as counting backwards. The problem of China is not too few engineers while it says about the problem US has at the moment.
Also since you mentioned Shenzhen, I think two points are worth raising: 1. the engineer corps which built the city in early 80s went into obscurity and a lot of them got far less than they deserved, which is again evidence that it is not engineering, but exploitation that got it done. 2. Back in 2014, when the economy was healthier, there 700 unnamed corpses PER DAY in the city, which totally defeats the sanctimonious 'China is safe' rhetoric. Not that rhetoric stands to much scrutiny, it is just that there hasn't been much scrutiny.
It seems more straightforward to say that China is a cooperative state where its people believe in working together to achieve social goals, while the US is a rivalrous state where its people believe in rivalry (checks and balances etc) to achieve private goals. It might not be as catchy as the “lawyers vs engineers” distinction but seems more accurate or at least a simpler distinction.
If the policy recommendation for the U.S. is just to spread awareness of the problem to get people excited about building, which then leads to a momentary political coalition that permits a once in a century buildout which ceases once a critical mass of people feel harmed, isn’t that just how the American socio-political system normally works? Even if the US’s history as a civilization is not long relative to other societies, we already have enough data to make out the contours of a cycle.
On the other hand, who knows what a Leninist developmental state with Chinese characteristics will do once its primary reason to exist (rapid development) becomes impossible due to the iron laws of economics? A bureaucratized perpetual revolution seems like a decent proposal for a solution given the CCP’s ideological and historical context, but it remains to be seen whether this will work in the long run.
Although it retains many imperial legacies, the PRC marks a firm break with the past and the history most relevant to guessing what the future may bring to China is even shorter than the U.S.’s. And the lovely thing about an unconstrained centralized corporatist state is that the stakes of “getting it to work” are extremely high, since the party’s failure is everyone’s failure and replacing leaders to get a do-over is not a pretty process.
Meanwhile, when the American developmental state goes into dormancy, the worst that happens is bridges start to rust and pipes leak, leading to complaints and political mobilization, a targeted buildout, and then it goes back into dormancy. Dan Wang relied on vibes of American doomerism and eternal Chinese global hegemony on the horizon to raise the stakes for the U.S., which is understandable given the need to spread awareness. However, in this bilateral comparison, the most obvious difference is unconstrained executive power and I fear increasingly many Americans are taking inspiration from that rather than the actual tactical problem of our built environments.
We’re Americans, nobody is coming to save us but ourselves. We should be angry that we aren’t building, and not because we have a weak state and effete leaders, but because as free people we will not stand for cracked roads and decrepit buildings. The decision to build is public and gathering a sufficiently large coalition requires public education, persuasion, horse trading, maybe a touch of bullying, etc.
In short, my personal sense is that the U.S. actually gets a lot right about its system. Based on Jonathon’s review I believe that the path forward is not to redesign our state and society from the ground up, but to just do politics: pass laws, fund building projects, and relax regulations. Discouraging people from becoming lawyers would not be the most effective use of our effort. Then regarding China, it has done a lot right but the design of its system is still unsettled…and the stakes are troublingly high.
Thoughts welcome and Jonathon rocks for interrogating this book so rigorously.
Well said! Enjoyed reading these thoughts. I came away from writing this piece more optimistic for America's future. One of the key reasons I favor liberalism as political system and philosophy is that it aims to min-max downside risk, i.e., solve the bad emperor problem. We may not always get optimal or even good outcomes, but we should rarely if ever get catastrophically bad ones. Relatedly, a good way to see the benefits of America's constrained executive is in contrast with the area where America's executive is least constrained: foreign policy. For all the regrettable activity we've gotten up to abroad in recent decades, I would contend the critical enabler is precisely that this is the area where liberal checks on power are least potent.
Wow. A tour de force. Thank you.
For your point "executive agencies are probably staffed by a greater share of engineers, technocrats, and non-lawyer professional managerial personnel (though this is speculation)."
I'm working on a piece on this—your speculation is, I think, mistaken. For instance, at USDA in the early 1900s, the agency directors (i.e., the people running agencies reporting directly to the secretary) had fairly elite technical backgrounds. About 2/3s of them had graduate degrees in their fields, such as chemistry, entomology, etc. Today, that's unimaginable. It's all politicians with law degrees.
USDA was an unusually technical department, but it common across the board to have engineers or scientists running agencies. The engineering-to-lawyer mindset shift 100% happened in the US.
This is just quibbling with an excellent piece, of course!
No this is great! Happy to update my priors (and amend the essay with a link to your piece). I’d be very curious if it’s possible to get a time series on agency director backgrounds.
Well, I need to finish writing the piece and get it published, is the first step! I would definitely like such a time series but it's laborious. I only checked for a single department for a single year, and I had to look up their biographies elsewhere. I don't think the feds kept records on it.
In line with your prior writings, this is the best synthesis of the "discourse" out there at the moment.
The more structural part of US "checks and balances" leading to lawyerly instincts that don't exist in the Chinese state structure seems to be the best summation of Dan's thesis (even if he doesn't quite make the connection you do between them).
Also enjoyed the travelogue, meeting people writeup at the start of this! Great writing and interactions.
Thanks for the kind words! Dan does have a great sentence somewhere (or perhaps he said it on a podcast) of the Declaration of Independence being a supremely lawyerly document, so I would be happy to note that Dan does draw the historical through-line as well. I just wanted to put my own gloss on it.
Just started reading the book as part of a book club discussion, lookjng forward to seeing the parallels and commentary! Thank you for the review.
Outstanding piece. I enjoyed Breakneck but I found lots of this useful. If this is the standard of public “disagreement” we have, the future is super bright!
I have only one very minor quibble - pursuing zero covid is what I would expect from an “engineering state” and not a vaccination of the elderly for the simple reason that vaccination would have meant setting people free and not “controlling the virus”.
very kind and thoughtful, thank you Feyi. Fair quibble. One man's Platonic "engineering state" may choose a different optimization function than another's!
Maybe this will sound like gen z defeatism, but as far as discussion of "what does this mean for the future?", I can't help but think that all this atoms business (with the exception of energy) will be overshadowed by bits (AI bits)...unless politics starts dropping bombs (physical) to bring things back to the classical/natural/economic/anthropological laws of history.
Doesn't sound like that all, it's a very valid axis of debate. Personally, I don't know if my status as a millennial (1994) influences my moderate pro-atom tilt, or maybe a bit of a grass is greener thinking on my part. Whatever the case, in truth I think it's much less a rigid binary and more a dialectic. Perhaps the future techno-utopia will reflect beautiful synthesis?
Myself coming from gen x cusp (79) I was only appropriating gen z there. While I also suspect a synthesis, I think it may be some weird butterfly effect synthesis of very sci-fi-y unknown unknowns, not of the big old categories like guns/germs/steel/atoms/bits.
Best thing I’ve read in a long while. Bravo!
Truly excellent essay!
What remains unaddressed is if the US actually needs more engineering of the giant public works kind. You can have an overbuilt infrastructure like Japan which keeps building expensive modern roads to abandoned mountain villages.
I am interested in reading a more fleshed out treatment about idea that today's American malaise has antecedents from well before the movements of the late 60s and 70s. I am not really sure that I agree, but it is an interesting counterpoint to the zeitgeist.
If that was the case, wouldn't the UK be a good counterpoint? It at least used to be a famously centralized country with no codified check of Parliamentary power, and yet they have encountered many of the same problems. Although the UK also has a strong legal tradition.
Perhaps the way to thread the needle is that the latent structure for obstruction and vetocracy was more present in the American tradition than in other countries, but it wasn't well harnessed until 60 years ago?
Interesting piece throughout. I loved the China analysis.
> a succession of statist presidents (Teddy, Wilson, FDR) largely under the pressures of the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Depression, and World War II.
The Spanish-American War was fought under McKinley. Teddy Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency after McKinley was assassinated, by which time Spain had been defeated.
Good correction, thanks! That sentence, for better or worse, was more vibe than analytic.
I learned a lot from this (including, after a moment's confusion, that you are citing a different Robert Kagan) and have now subscribed.
This is useful actually, thanks! Will change to Robert A. Kagan to hopefully forestall future confusion.
I enjoyed reading this a great deal. “Big think,” indeed!
Cheers Professor!
I think we can still subscribe Pettis on this and regard all this as counting backwards. The problem of China is not too few engineers while it says about the problem US has at the moment.
Also since you mentioned Shenzhen, I think two points are worth raising: 1. the engineer corps which built the city in early 80s went into obscurity and a lot of them got far less than they deserved, which is again evidence that it is not engineering, but exploitation that got it done. 2. Back in 2014, when the economy was healthier, there 700 unnamed corpses PER DAY in the city, which totally defeats the sanctimonious 'China is safe' rhetoric. Not that rhetoric stands to much scrutiny, it is just that there hasn't been much scrutiny.
sounds like from someone who hasn't needed to make much
It seems more straightforward to say that China is a cooperative state where its people believe in working together to achieve social goals, while the US is a rivalrous state where its people believe in rivalry (checks and balances etc) to achieve private goals. It might not be as catchy as the “lawyers vs engineers” distinction but seems more accurate or at least a simpler distinction.
Your analysis is impressive but somewhat unnecessary. My thoughts here: https://open.substack.com/pub/allenwlee/p/breakneck-a-reassurance-a-subterfuge?r=1iw3ae&utm_medium=ios