Dan Wang on China and the United States

I think the drawback of the lawyerly society is that lawyers are mostly focused on obstruction. And so they stop everything, good or bad. And what you don't have are stupid ideas like the One Child policy. What you also don't have is functioning infrastructure almost anywhere in the United States because it just simply cannot build a lot of pretty important things. And now the good fight.

with Yasha Monk. Why do Americans find it so hard to build infrastructure, railways, housing? Why has China succeeded at many averse tasks, but is seeing many of its richest and most influential people flee the country? What Does the future hold for the increasingly contentious competition between China and the United States?

Well, one of the more interesting books of this year attempts to answer this question. In Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang argues that the key to understanding this moment is to realize that America is a society of lawyers and China a country of engineers and that this has deeply shaped how each country is developing. On the podcast this week, Dan and I debate how useful a meta for this is is for understanding each country, why he is so pessimistic about Europe's ability to compete, why America is falling behind, but may not be fully outcompeted by China and many other topics.

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