How can a lawyerly society and an engineering society learn from each other? And what’s at stake if they fail? Author Dan Wang set out to answer those questions about the U.S. and China.
Guests
Dan Wang, research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. Former fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Let’s go back to 2001. A lot happened that year, of course, including something that at the time probably didn’t garner as much attention as it later would. 2001 was the year that the U.S.’ first ever proposed offshore wind farm applied for a construction permit with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The proposed wind farm would have 130 wind turbines across 24 acres of federal water off the coast of Massachusetts. The project would generate 454 megawatts of energy. It would power up to 400,000 homes. It took eight years, but by 2009, the project had one local and state approval, and by then it was known as Cape Wind.
In 2010, the federal government gave the project its nod and construction was slated to begin the next year. That didn’t happen. Cape Wind got tangled up in a mess of lawsuits. More than 25 of them by 2015 had been filed, and two years later, in 2017, Cape Wind’s developers abandoned the project. The long chain of litigation had led to significant financial setbacks, and the project just wasn’t feasible anymore.
More than $100 million in private investment torched. A couple of billion dollars in promised investment banished. 17 years of effort and opposition had led to not one single wind turbine. Meanwhile, over in China in 2023, a mere six years after Cape Wind made its exit, China constructed two thirds of the entire world’s wind and solar plants, two thirds, and that’s in just one year.
Yeah, that is something. Now you might feel like wind power isn’t worth it. So the U.S. didn’t lose anything with the cancellation of Cape Wind. Or you might still be weeping hot, angry tears, mourning what could have been with the offshore clean energy project. Either way, what you have to do is acknowledge at least one thing.
China can build stuff. The U.S. can litigate stuff. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. He’s a former fellow with Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. And for most of a decade he lived in China, residing in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai. And from that experience, Dan has come up with a simple but powerfully revealing dichotomy between China and the U.S.
China, he says, is an engineering society. The U.S. is a lawyerly one, and he explains in his fantastic new book, Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future, and he joins us now. Dan, welcome to On Point.
DAN WANG: Hi, Meghna. It’s a pleasure to be here.
CHAKRABARTI: Your book is easily one of my favorite books of the year, Dan, so I’m really excited to dive in with you here.
WANG: Thank you.
CHAKRABARTI: Now what I’d love to do in this first part of the show is just go through example after example of the scale and the sophistication of the kind of infrastructure building that has been happening in China. So early in the book, you identify your, quote, most vivid encounter with the engineering state as having happened in 2021 via bicycle.
Can you tell us that story?
WANG: In the summer of 2021 when China was still being ravaged by the policy of zero COVID, and the air in Shanghai when I was living, felt pretty stifling. I decided to try to go a little bit into the countryside and see the great mountains in the southwest. So Shanghai itself is already a marvel of a city, in which Shanghai works extremely well. It has excellent subway stations. It has excellent parks. It has wonderful high-speed rail. It’s just a super functional city in which a subway station is not very far away at all from where everyone lives or where everyone is taking coffee.
But I decided to go into the vast countryside and I went to the southwestern province of Guizhou. Guizhou is totally mountainous. It is very lush. It is China’s fourth poorest province, because it is so far away from its very distant coasts. And over five days, two friends and I had cycled from the capital city of Guiyang over to the city of
Changchun.
And over those five days, I saw just some of the most incredible infrastructure I’ve seen anywhere in the world. And it was only later on that I realized that Guizhou has about 45 of the world’s largest bridges in the world. It has about 13 airports for a province, without necessarily a great number of flyers.
It has just excellent high-speed rail and it is very well connected into the coastal provinces. And I started to contrast that with my life in California, where I’m speaking to you. Now, California is much wealthier by orders of magnitude. New York State would be much wealthier by orders of magnitude.
And these are states that simply do not have the level of infrastructure that China’s fourth poorest province is able to provide.
CHAKRABARTI: So talk to me more about that comparison. Because in the book you do point out how, in a sense, you marveled at the fact that Silicon Valley, I mean you’re in San Francisco right now, so Silicon Valley.
WANG: Correct.
CHAKRABARTI: Which is this place that’s generating essentially trillions of dollars of tech value. Not only for its founders and investors, but essentially for the world, that when you leave the small pockets of Palo Alto and Mountain View, et cetera, you immediately step into the rest of the Bay Area that actually is really suffering from a total lack of infrastructure investment, let alone homelessness, et cetera.
And then you get on an airplane and you fly to say Beijing or Shanghai and like how jarring is the actual difference. It is a completely instructive comparison and contrast between these two countries, and it really makes you wonder what exactly wealth is. So I’m speaking to you now from San Francisco where there is, there’s now a handful of companies that are worth over $3 trillion, and I believe Nvidia is worth over $4 trillion.
But for anyone actually living in the Bay Area, as you put very well, Meghna, there is just the highways are constantly clogged by traffic. Caltrain, the mass transit system does not work terribly well. Its trains are too infrequent. The subways have been reducing their service.
There’s a distressing number of people who are on the streets unhoused, and it’s not that California doesn’t invest a lot in infrastructure. Rather, it just doesn’t get very much out of its investments. San Francisco is very well known as the place with the $1.4 million public toilet. And after about $100 billion of investment we still don’t have very much high-speed rail.
But then take the plane from San Francisco, fly to Beijing or Shanghai, especially Shanghai. And you would step off the plane, get into a subway that connects you directly into the center of the city. You can then take the high-speed rail, if you like, into the province of Guizhou.
Everything feels much more orderly. Everything is much better connected, and everything is much better functional as soon as you cross into Asia.
Everything feels much more orderly. Everything is much better connected, and everything is … functional as soon as you cross into Asia.
CHAKRABARTI: It’s a very physical revelation. You mentioned high-speed rail in California. I just want to touch on that for a second. Because again, it’s such an instructive example.
As listeners know, and many of our listeners are indeed in California. A long time ago, there was the proposal, I guess it’s still alive, barely, but to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, which is what, less than 400-ish miles by high-speed rail. Hasn’t happened yet. You had mentioned that the price tag has ballooned to $100 billion.
But meanwhile, not that long ago, China built a high-speed rail system from Beijing to Shanghai, which is, what, 800 miles.
WANG: Yes. It is about the same distance actually, if we take a look at the entire system as proposed by California, which extends all the way from Sacramento to San Diego.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. Okay.
WANG: That’s actually about the exact distance between Beijing and Shanghai.
CHAKRABARTI: Got it. But the Beijing-Shanghai line exists so people can go from Beijing to Shanghai in what, four hours?
WANG: Correct. The year of 2008 was very important because in that year California voters approved by referendum that we are going to get this line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
That was also, coincidentally, the year that Beijing-Shanghai Line started construction. So three years later, the Beijing-Shanghai line completed construction at the cost of about $36 billion according to the public figures. And then according to official statistics released by the Chinese government.
Over the next 10 years, Beijing-Shanghai completed about 1.4 billion passenger trips. And right now, the state of California high-speed rail, about now 17 years after the referendum, it is still only a small stretch of rail has been built out in the desert. They’ve really shortened the line so that the first segment will operate between Merced and Bakersfield. And for the non Californians among us, that is pretty distant from San Francisco as well as LA.
And there is a ballooning price tag, and it is a kind of a torturous route. And I am strongly suspecting that I will not be able to go from LA to SF by High-Speed Rail before 2040 at the earliest.
CHAKRABARTI: Your dry humor, Dan, is spot on for the kind of ludicrousness of the long story of California high speed rail. We have about a minute before our first break, Dan. Do you have another sort of favorite engineering feat that you either lived with or saw when you were living in China?
WANG: Meghna, maybe you were weeping hot, angry tears over Cape Wind.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)
WANG: I am weeping hot sweet tears over here about this scale of clean technology deployment, which is not happening. Before the minute is up, I will just leave one statistic for the listener, which is that this year, China will deploy about 500 gigawatts of solar power alone.
So solar production that is meant to be connected to the grid. The U.S. will connect 50 gigawatts. So one order of magnitude and there is now 33 nuclear plants under construction in China. There is zero in the U.S.
And there’s not just many homes, mass transit. Everything needs to be done better in the U.S. and not much of that is happening.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Dan, you write in the book that China, modern China’s building spree, massive building spree, got its start in the 1990s. And then as you mentioned in the previous segment, received a huge boost in 2008 and has been going on ever since. I have only been to China once, sadly.
And it was in 2005, and I went with my family. And even back then, 20 years ago, there’s two things I remember. We took a trip down the Yangtze to the Three Gorges Dam, and it was astonishing, obviously, the scale of the dam, but then also along the river, just looking out, over the side of the boat and seeing entire cities, right? That had gone underwater as the reservoir rose, but those people had been moved to entirely brand-new cities. Further up the banks of the Yangtze. And the second thing I remember is, again, this is 2005, but in Shanghai we got on a Maglev train. I think at that time it was very short.
The track was short. But I remember watching the speedometer on the Maglev rise and rise. And rise until it hit 444 kilometers per hour. Now to achieve that speed for only just like a little bit, because the terminus was not that far away, but I remember turning to my dad and saying, We are sitting in the future, there is no way we in the United States are going to be able to keep up.
It was that jarring, but when can you, when do you trace the sort of beginning of Chinese leadership’s desire to deliver material wellbeing to the 1 billion plus people of China through massive infrastructure projects?
WANG: Throughout the 1980s and in fact, the Three Gorges Dam is one of the key parts of this political agenda.
Deng Xiaoping had taken office as the top leader in China by the late ’70s. And he had surveyed the vast misrule of the Mao … years. And decided to do the opposite of Mao, what Mao had been doing. Mao was a warlord. He was a romantic. He was a poet, he was a revolutionary, and he had plunged the country into utter chaos through policies that included the Great Leap Forward as well as the cultural revolution agenda.
And Xiaoping took a look at this sort of rule by poet and said what is the opposite of a romantic poet? It is something like a mechanical engineer. And throughout the 1980s as well as throughout the 1990s, Deng Xiaoping was very consciously picking technocrats, trained in engineering, in a very Soviet style, to really promote into the Chinese leadership and such that by the year 2002, every single member of the Politburo Standing Committee, which is the nine-member highest ruling echelon of the Communist Party.
All nine of them have had degrees in engineering and some of them were trained as hydraulic engineers. And the Three Gorges Dam comes into this as a key project that some of these hydraulic engineers, namely Li Peng, the former premier of China, took on because he wanted to erase his name as the butcher of Beijing, for having ordered the crackdowns around, in 1989.
And partly of what the leadership wanted to demonstrate was that they were able to achieve these giant mega projects that were able to displace a lot of people. That is an extremely impressive feat of engineering, to produce an enormous amount of power, to generate economic growth.
And so part of China’s mega building spree is a demonstration by the leadership that the country can deliver enormous, impressive, functional, sometimes useful, sometimes not so useful works for the people, to make their lives better.
CHAKRABARTI: So this is, would an appropriate analogy in terms of the engineering expertise of China’s top leaders be like, if we had that in the United States, we would have a president’s cabinet that was full of the Secretary of Transportation, would have a degree in construction engineering and the Secretary of Defense would know all about fluid dynamics. Is that the kind of analogy that would be appropriate?
WANG: Yes, indeed. And I think that would be very nice if such a thing could be true.
CHAKRABARTI: Except we have the opposite. We have the other sort of half of the dichotomy that you write about in the book in terms of the American leader, political leadership filled with lawyers. You have some astonishing statistics about what percentage or how many U.S. presidents in the past up to 10 U.S. presidents were anything but lawyers.
The vast majority were all have all legal degrees, right?
WANG: That’s exactly right. And it is astonishing that there is a parallel between the Chinese and Americans in this case. The Chinese are very substantially made up of engineers, and the American top leaders are very substantially made up of lawyers.
The Chinese are very substantially made up of engineers, and the American top leaders are very substantially made up of lawyers.
In the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate, there’s about 54 members of the U.S. Senate who went to law school. There’s a single one who have had any sort of STEM education at all. Five last 10 U.S. presidents went to law school, and it’s especially concentrated in the Democratic Party. Every single presidential nominee from 1980 to 2024 most recently, Kamala Harris, all of them had gone to a law school and there is a deeper root of lawyers in America. And if we take a look at most of the founding fathers most of them were lawyers. First 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, 13 of them had been lawyers. And so the lawyerly roots in America are very deep, indeed.
CHAKRABARTI: But that didn’t stop America until, as you observe, until the 1960s.
From being the 19th and 20th century equivalent of what China is now, of having the verve to think big, to build big, to improve the lives of many, not all people, through massive infrastructure projects. So what happened?
WANG: That’s right. So I think that the United States was an engineering state in its own right, essentially in this roughly hundred-year period between about the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.
So over this roughly hundred plus year period, the U.S. had built enormous canal systems in New York. It built the Transcontinental Railroad; it built skyscrapers in Chicago and Manhattan. And in the 20th century, it built the interstate highway system. It built the Manhattan project, the Apollo program.
And so the U.S. has had a degree of manufacturing excellence. It has had success in building a lot of infrastructure. And that’s mostly because the political elites were in agreement that this is a vast territory, about exactly as big as China, that had more and more migrants coming in, substantially through Europe, and that this was a vast land that needed a lot of infrastructure.
And crucially though most American presidents and political elites had been lawyers, they were lawyers of a very different sort. Up until FDR, the cabinet of Franklin D. Roosevelt was very lawyerly. The administrators of the New Deal were almost all lawyers, but they were lawyers of a slightly different character.
They were more like Wall Street lawyers. They were creative deal makers. Sometimes they raised bonds for the tycoons, and sometimes they helped the tycoons, eminent domain, the people in their way to, against, say, a railroad development. And then throughout the 1960s. some of the creative deal making Wall Street lawyer types disappeared.
They turned among students at Yale Law School, at Harvard Law School, into more regulators and litigator types, who had recognized that the U.S. had made tremendous mistakes with its engineering project. So the U.S. had built too many highways throughout cities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was spraying DDT and other pesticides way too much.
And there was a necessary, excellent, over correction against some of these problems of the prototypical American engineering state. But I think right now we are wondering, we should wonder whether we should still be tackling the problems of the 1960s.
CHAKRABATI: Okay. So this is a really important point because your book is not just China engineering state good, U.S. lawyerly society bad. It’s far more nuanced than that. And this sort of fulcrum of the 1960s is demonstrative of that because, as you just said, part of the reason why in terms of like at least infrastructure, this shift to a more lawyerly approach came because there was needed correction in the downsides of massive infrastructure projects in the U.S.
Namely very often the most vulnerable people like lost their homes or their lands or their livelihoods when the big projects came through. And then as you mentioned, the environmental costs were suddenly starting to mount up, and we needed the U.S. legal system in order to contain those environmental externalities more.
And that brings me back to the Chinese example, and again, thinking of what I saw 20 years ago with the Three Gorges Dam, I had mentioned there were entire cities underwater. Oh yes, those people who lived in those cities got new cities to live in, further up the banks of the Yangtze.
But they also didn’t have a choice. That’s the key thing. There was no option to push back against the Chinese central government and say, I don’t want to leave my home. This is where my family and my culture resides. They just didn’t have a choice. That’s not a reality in China.
WANG: That’s right. About a million people had been displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, and though the government offered compensation, it wasn’t something that many of them were able to turn down. Now, not every project engineering project in China looks like the Three Gorges Dam. Very often there is some degree of pushback and often the compensation is generous.
But I would say that it is absolutely the case that when the government wants something done, it will get it done by hook or by crook. And there are many people in its way. And you’re absolutely right, Meghna, that I am not saying that the U.S. needs to be ruled by engineers. I think that it would be a disaster for to be ruled by engineers, because I trace through some of these catastrophes enacted in China.
Because the country’s leaders don’t just treat the physical environment or the economy as an engineering exercise. They are also fundamentally social engineers. And I spent a lot of time thinking about the one child policy, as well as zero COVID, which the number is right there in the name.
It really feels like treating society as a big optimization problem, and they are treating people as just another building material to be remolded or torn down, as they wish.
CHAKRABARTI: So I want to spend the last third of the show talking about zero COVID because it is a very potent example here. But can I just take a little detour for a second, Dan, because I did not expect myself to be smiling or even laughing as much as I did while reading your book.
You are a very good and also humorous writer. I’ll just, speaking of presidents who are lawyers. You write again early in the book that from 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominee went to law school. They also make up many Republican party elites.
By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers. Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. And then you write, Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.
How did you find so much humor in this complex issue that you were taking a look at?
WANG: I believe in two things. First, my heritage is of southwestern China where people sit around, drink a lot of tea and gossip, and I firmly believe that we are the funniest region of China.
CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)
WANG: And so I first I want to enact that. And second, I believe that two of the most humorless places in the world are, first, the official China as represented by Beijing. Though Beijinger’s can be funny, official China is not. And the second most unfunny place is Silicon Valley, where I’m speaking to you from now.
And a lot of these people are not only serious, they’re also self serious. And I think we gotta be as irreverent as we can, especially as we’re talking about these weighty subjects.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let me ask you, I just wanted to ask you that because this was such, it was a joy to read this book even as you were exploring, as you said, really weighty issues in an attempt, as you say, to help the U.S. and China understand each other better. Because you argued that is one of the most critical things that needs to happen.
Because these two countries, no matter what they do, they have a profound impact on the entire rest of the world. Can you talk about that a little bit more?
WANG: I think that these two countries are the two big superpowers, and the rest of the world is either too young or too mature really to match their pace.
And I feel like it is very much the case that the future is being invented in Silicon Valley as well as Xinjiang, as well as Wall Street, as well as Beijing, that these are the crucial hubs and fulcrums that are really going to determine a lot of what we are all going to be buying and what we’re all going to be thinking.
[T]he future is being invented in Silicon Valley as well as Xinjiang, as well as Wall Street, as well as Beijing.
And so I think it is really important that we understand China and also understand the U.S. as well. And part of why I wrote this book was after spending six momentous years in China, I was unsatisfied with some of these political science terms like socialist or capitalist or neoliberal or democratic, really to try to understand them.
I really wanted to try to be fun and inventive and playful in thinking through what it means to be ruled by engineers and what it means to be ruled by lawyers. And a lot of what I’m trying to do with this book is to acknowledge that plenty of Americans, even those who are pretty curious about China, will never visit the country.
And I wanted to portray a little bit of the density of life as I experienced it, living in Shanghai, cycling in Guangzhou, traveling all around the country to merely give a sense of to Americans how interesting, dynamic, fun, bizarre the country really can be.
CHAKRABARTI: Dan, you need to make your book into a television series because of exactly what you just said.
There’s a lot of Americans, the majority of them, who will never actually get this kind of granular understanding, even feel for what you’re talking about. I just, I think it would make a television, massive television series. So any TV producers out there who are listening, there’s your next pitch.
But I do want to quickly touch on something else that’s quite important, because we have been talking about the macro changes with these huge infrastructure projects being successfully completed in China. But you write, the engineering state citing socialism with Chinese characteristics is set up to give people one main thing, material improvements, mostly through public works.
So at the level of individual Chinese, have they experienced those material improvements everywhere in China?
WANG: I would say most everywhere in China have experienced a lot of construction, and for the most part that has been pretty positive. Now, first, I’ll acknowledge that excessive construction has a lot of cost.
A million people displaced for the Three Gorges Dam and all sorts of displacement happening every year to build another highway or another bridge. There’s enormous financial waste building a lot of these bridges. Often, these are bridges to nowhere. Sometimes they become two nowheres, become two somewheres.
But a lot of these very tall bridges in Guizhou are not able to meet their interest bonds. But I think what a lot of construction does is that it gives people a sense of optimism for the future. You didn’t have a subway station. Now you do. You weren’t able to be connected to another city, to Shanghai.
Now you’re able to get there by high speeded rail. And once you have that, people feel optimism for the future, and I think that is also part of the reason that the Communist Party still has consent of the governed.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Dan, you write about in the book how everything about this engineering society mindset is, can be highlighted in even the simplest ways, like the incentives, you say in the United States, a rail project’s success is measured by the number of jobs created, not necessarily the number of miles of track laid, whereas it’s the actual completion of projects in China that matter.
When you are so deeply entrenched, when a nation is so deeply entrenched in these sort of engineering metrics of success, as you said, it leads to applying those same metrics to issues, to social issues. And I would love to hear from you what it was actually like to live in China during the attempts to get COVID down to zero there.
As you said, the issue is in the name, the success value was, let’s get it to zero.
WANG: Yeah, so I was in China over all three years of zero COVID, and I detected almost three big acts in this very big trauma. So the first act of this trauma, I was in Beijing at the start of 2020, hearing about this new respiratory virus that was circulating out of Wuhan.
And once Wuhan entered lockdown, many of us had grown very angry about what was happening. This was the second big respiratory virus to emerge from China in the last 20 years, the first being SARS 20 years ago. And it had blown up in almost exactly the same way, when the authorities were uninterested in whistleblowers and didn’t want to disturb the public.
And they censored a lot of news, most prominently from an ophthalmologist that tried to warn people that a virus was circulating. And so many of us had grown quite mad at the state of the affairs. But then there was a long second act of China’s zero COVID policy, in which China managed to contain the virus through a lot of pretty ruthless means, but they were very effective.
China managed to contain the virus through a lot of pretty ruthless means, but they were very effective.
So China essentially closed down the borders. It required everyone to have contact tracing apps. It took people who were positive and away from their families and put them in centralized quarantine facilities, like stadiums and convention centers.
So they wouldn’t infect the rest of the family. And over March and April, those measures worked in 2020 to help the restaurants get going again. And normal life was starting to return somewhat in the spring of 2020. And I and other Chinese were looking abroad and seeing Donald Trump’s America. And 2020 did not look stellar. And Europe, Japan nothing else looked like, nowhere else looked like they were controlling the virus very effectively.
And people were able to put up with these virus controls for quite a long while, up until the third act of 2022, when the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus started circulating. And that was when the Chinese tried to deploy exactly the same playbook, and that triggered disastrous lockdowns.
Shanghai, where I was living, imposed what I think is the most ambitious lockdown ever attempted in the history of humanity, in which 25 million people were unable to leave their apartment compounds, over the course of about eight weeks in the spring of 2022. A lot of people were food insecure, because the government did not organize sufficient food deliveries.
Parents went hungry to save food for their kids, and a lot of people had gone pretty nuts or they had their medical conditions untreated over those eight weeks, and all of this fell apart. By the end of 2022, which is when I got COVID in Shanghai when total, when zero COVID became total COVID, when the government essentially threw up its hands and decided no longer to enforce this policy anymore.
CHAKRABARTI: So what lesson do you draw from that, in terms of the limits of thinking that everything, not just physical infrastructure, but entire societies can be engineered towards a specific goal.
WANG: I think the lessons I take are, first of all, if you’re walking around, I dare say in Boston or the suburbs of Boston, maybe you’ll see this yard sign that I see everywhere, saying something like, science is real.
And I think that this is where I want to defend the lawyers just a little bit to say that, it is lawyers have an important part in guaranteeing some degree of pluralism in elite debates. And if you are ruled entirely by scientists and engineers who treat society as an optimization problem, you may well end up in a place like zero COVID. Or in a place like the one child policy and science is real. But let’s think about what to do with the science and think about what sort of policies ought to be in place.
I am now, I think that it is really important to have a degree of pluralism in both the U.S. as well as in China. Because I want to be clear that rule by lawyers, rule entirely by lawyers is not good and rule entirely by engineers is not good either.
CHAKRABARTI: You just said a phrase, which is so important, an optimization problem. Because in the United States, we have the technocratic elite. You’re living in the middle of them right now in San Francisco who do view the world as entirely an optimization problem.
And that is, that leads to, you actually use the phrase in the book, infamous sayings like, move fast and break things because people don’t matter.
It’s optimizing systems that do. So we still, I mean at least in the world of tech, we still have, that is the dominant sort of paradigm.
WANG: Yes, that’s right. In fact, now I’ll tell you a secret, Meghna. I had considered titling my book before Breakneck: Move fast and break people, China’s quest to engineer the future. And so this is a country that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people. And this is where I wanna be very careful about thinking about trade-offs. I think it is important not to be ruled entirely by engineers.
And one of my realizations is that the line between rationality and irrationality can be pretty thin. You could be pretty rational. And being technocratic and imposing all of these policies that are being prescribed by the World Health Organization. But then, you can swerve into disaster really easily.
And so my defense of the lawyers is that I think that the lawyerly society does not move fast and break things very easily. And often that is good, because you need to be able to avert disasters like some of these big optimization problems. And so I really want the rest of the world to get to a better place.
We don’t have to choose between the two of that. And I think the other big, nice, the only really nice thing about being ruled by engineers is that I think the change in physical environment really does give people a sense of optimism for the future. Because I think the problem with being ruled by lawyers, conversely, is that I think lawyers are really good at defending the rich.
We opened the segment by talking about Cape Wind. This was a lot of wealthy homeowners in the island of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Essentially hiring, including some really top professors at Harvard to defend their views from wind turbines. And I think that America works really well for the rich.
If you’re a rich person in New York, if you’re a rich person in San Francisco, you don’t really have to deal with these housing shortages. You don’t have to deal with poor mass transit subway systems. You get these skinny skyscrapers in in New York City; you get to live in these big homes in California. And what I would really like is for a state that is able to work a little bit more on behalf of the middle class, and on behalf of the working class who do need homes, and who do need subway systems to get to work and enjoy their lives in a little bit of a better way.
CHAKRABARTI: So this is where, again, going back to your very insightful revealing about how many lawyers make up America’s political elite as well, that we have a self-reinforcing system that actual changes for the middle class and other Americans won’t happen. Because as you said, you were writing this book when you were a fellow at the Tsai China Center at Yale Law School.
So you were within, you were in, as you said, one of the high temples of America’s Lawyerly Society. Talk to me about that a little bit. I thought it was really exciting to be surrounded by the aspirants to American elites. And so the students I know at Yale Law School are terrifically hard workers.
They are very thoughtful about the world. And they are, I think, especially perhaps totally ambitious about trying to change the world as they understand it. And that is something I see in Silicon Valley as well. Where change the world is definitely, at this point, a cliche.
And I think that there is still a sentiment among most students, among most lawyers, that the state can be too powerful and the state must be restrained. And I think that is absolutely the case that if President Donald Trump makes an illegal move, it is really important for the federal judiciary to block some of these disastrous illegal moves.
But I also feel like too many lawyers are still stuck with thinking through the problems of the past, thinking through the problems of Robert Moses, who tore through too many neighborhoods in New York City, thinking through some of these really big mistakes committed by let’s say the U.S. Department of Agriculture and spraying DDT absolutely everywhere.
And I think what we need at this moment now is to have much better levels of infrastructure. If we have a lot of homes burned in Los Angeles disastrously, then I think we need to be able to rebuild a lot of these homes. And to give you a sense of life in New Haven, I was living a little bit of a monastic life at the Yale Law School which was very pleasant as I was writing this book. But I will admit that every so often I was seduced by the pleasures of New York and occasionally taking the Metro North trains to see the opera in New York or something.
What we need at this moment now is to have much better levels of infrastructure [in America].
And the Metro North trains are good. They work well. They are a little bit slow but they are pretty reliable. And I felt that the Metro North was pretty good until I happened to come across a timetable from the year 1914. When I saw that it was slightly faster going from Grand Central to New Haven about a hundred years ago than it is today.
CHAKRABARTI: 1914. Oh wow.
WANG: And it’s not a totally fair comparison because the trains today make many more stops. But at a first approximation, we’re not moving faster than we are about a hundred years ago. And I think there is something to a society that is able to move faster, which is the way that China has been moving year by year.
And it does not feel good that in the U.S. we are getting slower year by year.
CHAKRABARTI: It feels terrible. Not good is a gentle way of putting it. It feels terrible. It’s become the butt of jokes, right? In the first Trump administration, infrastructure week became a meme immediately, because there was never any infrastructure week.
The Biden administration did push through its massive infrastructure investment package. So the money was there, but because of the exact lawyerly and bureaucratic issues you raise in the book. Very little of that, or not enough of that, was actually translated into infrastructure improvements, for the American people.
So I think another lesson that I draw from your book, Dan, is that the lawyerly society in the United States, it is, as you said, very good at protecting the interests of the elite. And as you say, the engineering state in China is really good at construction, not obstruction, but it also doesn’t necessarily allow for the polity of a healthy society.
You implore China and America to learn things from each other, but for as long as the elite are supporting the elite in a sense in both countries, how can that happen? I think what we need to do is to have just a little bit more learning from each other. I don’t want the U.S. or China to copy each other.
What we need to do is to have just a little bit more learning from each other. I don’t want the U.S. or China to copy each other.
I don’t think that the U.S. should copy China at all. I want to be very clear about that, but I think we should study some aspects of China’s system and just understand it. And think about what works for them. So I think that there is growing conversation among both the American left, as well as the American right, represented by things like the abundance agenda, represented by things like progress studies, really try to ask what is going wrong in the U.S. and how do we get better?
And I think I’m very supportive of these efforts. And my prescription for both China and the U.S. is that I hope that the U.S. could be, let’s say, 20% more engineering, such that if the very rich state of California declares we are going to have high-speed rail, then we’re going to get high-speed rail. And it should really gleam once people are sitting in these trains. And I think that the U.S. needs to just build a lot more of the things that people need.
Not just the homes, but also the vast manufacturing base, which I think has been rusting throughout the U.S.
As the U.S. hasn’t built enough planes, enough semiconductors to meet people’s needs. And I really hope that China could be 50% more lawyerly. Because I think that the Chinese people really deserve to be living under a regime that respects individual rights, that respects creative impulses that really works. And works better for the people and leaves them alone.
And so that’s my prescription. U.S., 20% more engineering. China, 50% more loyal.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
