America’s degrowth lawyers need to learn from China
Dan Wang on engineers, building, and authoritarianism in his new book Breakneck
It’s fun to play a game of superlatives with China. From the awe-inspiring and cyberpunk scale of the metro trains cruising through apartment blocks in Chongqing to the stupendous rate of its shipbuilding, housing construction and waterworks, China has shown that it can build like no other. That includes the just-announced Medog Hydropower Station, which at $167 billion would be one of the largest and most expensive construction projects ever seen. Behind all of this activity is a state organized for engineering, designed for speed and scale.
That’s one half of the thesis of Breakneck, the new book out by Dan Wang, which was already long listed for book of the year by the Financial Times. The other half of the thesis is that America is ruled by a lawyerly society, one that holds up projects across years of red tape and lawsuits in the name of everything from noise pollution to just good old-fashioned trolling. Can we have growth without the lawyers? And what are the costs when every project can’t be debated to its most minute detail?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear more of the conversation, please subscribe to our Riskgaming podcast.
Danny Crichton:
Dan, you just published “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.” Your thesis is that, in China, you have an engineering society, a society that’s built around outcomes. And you contrast that with the due process, lawyerly culture of America.
Dan Wang:
One of these strange things about superpowers is that they tend to specialize, and the United States is obviously a lawyerly society. This is something that we can see from the very founding of the country. Of the first 16 U.S. presidents, from Washington to Lincoln, 13 of them had practiced law. Even the Declaration of Independence reads like the start of a litigation document.
And that is a pretty striking contrast with China, where since the 1980s, the elites have been much more significantly trained in engineering. The differences became really apparent to me when I lived through the Zero-Covid experience. Think about that policy, or the one-child policy. The numbers are right there in the name.
It is apparent that the United States couldn’t and wouldn’t do something like Zero-Covid, couldn’t and wouldn’t do something like the one-child policy, but it also doesn’t have any functional infrastructure anywhere. When I was a fellow at Yale, I was commuting every so often into New York City. The Metro North trains are actually quite good. They’re comfortable, they’re a little bit slow. I thought that was all fine, but then I came across a timetable for the New Haven Railroad from 1914, and it kind of galled me that the trains were faster over 100 years ago than they are today.
Danny Crichton:
We’re going to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Erie Canal here in New York in three or four weeks. The Erie Canal was one of the grand public works projects in U.S. history. It opened up the Great Lakes, opened up an immense amount of economic growth, and set the tone for the industrial era of the 1800s. So, as you point out, we’ve had lawyers from the beginning, but we have been able to build incredible public works in some periods. What changed over the last couple of decades?
Dan Wang:
The lawyers changed.
I certainly acknowledge that there has been a lot of construction in America’s past. In fact, it overbuilt throughout the 1950s into the 1960s, and a lot of the American public revolted against aspects of the American engineering state. In the 1960s, people had grown aware of the use of DDT and other pesticides across the farmland. They were revolting over the highways Robert Moses was ramming through New York City. There was broad exhaustion over the war in Vietnam, and there was also the sense that companies, especially the car companies and the oil companies, had grown too close to the regulators.
The lawyers, up through the New Deal, were very much creative deal-maker types. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a lawyer; the New Deal cabinet was full of lawyers. But these were lawyers who had maybe been in the service of robber barons in the past and were trying to figure out how to eminent domain people out of their homes in order to build a railway. Or they were raising bonds for a railway project. They were, let’s call them Wall Street lawyers, who were very creative in making deals.
But after this turn in the 1960s, the lawyers themselves became much more interested in being regulators and litigators. We have students at elite law schools like Harvard Law and Yale Law, saying things like, “sue the bastards.” And by, “bastards,” they meant the government that was spraying pesticides everywhere. There was a new consciousness within elite law schools. They saw government as the problem, not the solution. It was an ideology that flowed really well with Ronald Reagan’s mottos.
Guizhou, which is China’s fourth-poorest province, has a GDP per capita on about the level of Botswana. But it has extensive high-speed rail, much better than California High-Speed Rail. Guizhou also has a lot of subways and bridges. I think it has about 50 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges.
Danny Crichton:
It shocked me when I read in Breakneck that the United States has, what, three to four times more lawyers per capita than Europe. Why the difference?
Dan Wang:
Well, within Europe, there’s some variation. Per capita levels of lawyers in Italy is a little bit higher than in the United States, and the Nordics have far fewer as a share of the population. Partly these reflect different systems of common law, perhaps civil law. Partly it reflects the esteem with which lawyers are held. One of the striking things to me is how highly lawyers are generally held in American society.
Danny Crichton:
When you’re talking about the engineering state, you have a compromise. On one hand, there’s immense value. You see YouTube videos of people in Shanghai Station and see just the number of lines, the number of tracks, the number of trains. But there’s a real human cost to the engineering state.
Dan Wang:
A lot of the apparent successes and failures of the engineering state were made obvious to me in the summer of 2021, when I bicycled from Guiyang to Chongqing, two cities in China’s very mountainous southwest. Normally I try to go abroad in the summers, but because it was Zero-Covid, I was stuck. And so I rallied two friends to go through the southwest, in part because there are so many mountains. It’s extremely beautiful. We cycled through Guizhou, which is China’s fourth-poorest province. It has a GDP per capita on about the level of Botswana. It has around 11 airports, many of them with fewer than a dozen flights a week.
But it has extensive high-speed rail, much better than California High-Speed Rail. Guizhou also has a lot of subways and bridges. I think it has about 50 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. Yet you see the poverty. People don’t have that much to do. Most of the working-age population has gone off to the coastal provinces where they can get a job. They’ve left their children in the care of grandparents, and there isn’t that much economic activity.
I would say that there are plenty of problems with China’s infrastructure build-out, but they don’t overwhelm the benefits it has produced.
What are some of the costs? Well, there’s an obvious environmental cost. There is a human displacement cost. There’s a big financial cost. And yet, for the most part, having a lot of infrastructure has been good for people, because even if you’re building a bridge to nowhere, both ends become somewheres. The projects have also produced a degree of political resilience for the Communist Party.
What I’m always curious to ask is, why can’t it happen here? Why can’t California have better mass transit? To say nothing of high-speed rail, let’s just have more frequent Caltrain service between San Francisco and Palo Alto and Mountain View every day. Why does it take about five years to renovate the Port Authority Bus Terminal?
Danny Crichton:
And we know, or at least I’m cynical enough to know, it is never going to take five years.
But let me ask you this, you bring up Robert Moses toward the end of the book. He leaves office and is sort of kicked out in the early 1970s. And in 1975, we famously had Drop Dead, New York, with Ford saying, in effect, “Look, the city’s bankrupt, to hell with you, you’re going down the drain.” Part of that was overbuilding. Part of that was fiscal profligacy not just around infrastructure, but also pensions and state employees.
When you look at a poor province like Guizhou, the debt situation is very bleak. You’ve had these massive projects; they don’t make economic sense. You have this view that there are externalities. We’ve previously had on the podcast Ian Coss, who made a similar case about the Big Dig project in Massachusetts. Gorgeous, completely revitalized downtown, $25 billion. But he basically made this argument: it was a torrentially large and profligate project, but in the end, if you look at the benefits that accrued to the city, it does add up. It was worth $25 billion, and we should have been willing to spend it.
How do you balance “if you build it, they will come,” with the fact that there is clearly overbuild?
Dan Wang:
There is certainly overbuild in China. I think both countries are overcorrecting their past problems. Since reform and opening up got going in the 1980s, China had a severe shortage of housing and infrastructure of all sorts. China’s train systems were completely overloaded. People didn’t have enough housing. The engineering state was organized to solve a lot of these problems.
Another big problem in China is that, generally, if you’re a party secretary, the political system almost never lets you run your home province. You don’t have characters like Joe Biden, who spent his entire life representing the state of Delaware, which is the place he’s from. And so you could be a governor of a Chinese province in the northeast, and now you’re dropped into the southwest, where you have no real power base by design — but also no real understanding. So, what do you do? Well, you just do what the other guy did, which is build yet another highway or maybe some weird European city square.
There are still some places where the country could use a little bit more construction. And as you point out in the case of the Big Dig, is it good for a city not to be completely crisscrossed by highways? Yeah, absolutely. None of us would ever really want to purchase a home there, which is part of the reason that a city empties out. But I also feel like we don’t have to face this choice between nothing and a Big Dig that costs $25 billion. Perhaps it should have cost something like $12 billion and have been completed at twice the pace. Maybe that could have happened if we made a couple of big decisions earlier.
Danny Crichton:
This was a key message of your book, and it dovetails with a lot of the ‘abundance’ discussion going on in 2025. There’s the idea that better project management can get you a win-win where you can actually spend less and get more. You particularly highlight this dichotomy in China, where private industry and the public sector are both very efficient, or at least use their resources in a very effective way. In the United States, I think we have a very efficient private sector — maybe it can be over optimized for short-term value as opposed to long-term gain — and then a very profligate public sector.
But another problem in the United States is the loss of talent. Say we decide we need a subway, and we’re not looking to learn from China and we’re not even looking to buy Chinese trains. How do you start to think about those “communities of practice,” as you call them? In a country like the United States that has given up manufacturing, that gave up public works over the last 30, 40 years, how do you start to rebuild that talent base?
Dan Wang:
I think that’s an important point, and this is something I admire your thinking on, Danny. You’re good at thinking in time. I remember you making this point of someone coming out of, let’s say a PhD program, in the 1960s. Is that when we did the last big immigration overhaul?
Danny Crichton:
’65, yeah.
Dan Wang:
And so you end up thinking like, oh, we will study the challenges of immigration reform, such that we’re able to do it much better again, but we never do it for 60 years. And where has this person’s talents been deployed?
Thinking in time is very important.
And what I want to point out is that China has seen an expansion in communities of engineering practice over the last 40 years as it has acquired the ability to build pretty much everything, including some of the most sophisticated electronics on the planet. By contrast, we have seen a withering of process knowledge and communities of engineering practice in the United States.
So that is a big challenge. Once communities of engineering practice dissolve, once a factory closes, it is difficult to re-employ everyone and get that knowledge started again, because you have cascading knowledge loss.
One simple thing I would recommend for the United States is to acknowledge that China has a lot of process knowledge and that it has something to teach the United States in things like electric vehicle batteries. If it is the case that China got to where it is through forced technology transfer against Apple or Tesla, then why isn’t the United States doing the same thing to CATL or BYD or DJI or any of these big Chinese companies? Why don’t we have them set up shop in Wisconsin or Ohio or Pennsylvania, ring-fence some security around it, and then try to get that technology from them?
Unfortunately, nearly everything we’re seeing out of the Trump administration seems to present more headwinds than tailwinds in terms of technology pursuit. Maybe there’s something positive to be said about Trump’s energy agenda, maybe there’s something positive to say about his deregulatory agenda, but if we take a look at everything else, since Liberation Day, the tariffs have cost about 40,000 manufacturing worker employment losses.
Kneecapping the NSF and the NIH is an unobvious way to attain technological scientific primacy. Attacking universities, same goes with that. And deporting quite a lot of the lower-skilled workforce, workers who are important for construction as well as manufacturing — and also deterring a lot of high-skilled researchers from coming to the United States — most of these things are not going in the right direction.
I’m hopeful that we can at least stop hurting ourselves. And then the important question becomes, how do we rebuild?
I think we are absolutely learning the wrong lessons from China, and making Intel a state-owned enterprise with American characteristics — it is hard to imagine that will make Intel much better.
Danny Crichton:
Another subject that keeps coming up is that the United States seems to be going down the route toward state capitalism. Buying 10% of Intel. We saw this with U.S. Steel, where the government got what was described as a golden share — something quite literally inspired by similar shares in China.
I’ve written very negative pieces on this, but nonetheless … are we learning the wrong lessons from China? Is it just not compatible with the U.S. system?
Dan Wang:
I think we are absolutely learning the wrong lessons from China, and making Intel a state-owned enterprise with American characteristics — it is hard to imagine that will make Intel much better.
What we have in the United States is, unfortunately, authoritarianism without the good stuff.
What we are learning from China is a loss of data probity. What we are learning from China is visiting misfortune upon a lot of the downtrodden, surrounding the top leader with acolytes and producing the sense that every mistake is the fault of foreigners or traitors. And I think what we have in the United States is, unfortunately, authoritarianism without the good stuff, because the United States could be learning better things.
Maybe it could be learning the build-out of better public transit. Maybe it could be producing better public order in the streets. Maybe the United States could be producing more functional cities. To the extent that the United States is trying to build and engineer anything, a lot of it consists of gilded ballrooms and detention centers.
Danny Crichton:
A couple of weeks ago, we had the New York City Abundance crew on Riskgaming, Ryder and Catherine. Both of them sit on their neighborhood associations, the boards that basically approve everything that goes on in the neighborhood. I believe it was Catherine who was talking about how, on the Land Use Committee, she spends hours a month on questions like the proper color of a door. You have this focus on proceduralism that shows up in the book over and over again. And you point out, there’s authoritarianism with only the downsides, not really the positive sides.
But you also point out that only an engineering state could do the one-child policy. Only the engineering state could do the Zero-Covid policy, and specifically the lockdowns in Shanghai where, for eight weeks, everyone was locked into an apartment with drones circling them as soon as they tried to go out. Which, from the American perspective, seems … well, you are not going to get New Yorkers to follow any policy. We can’t get people not to take a dump on the subway, let alone stay inside their apartments for long periods of time.
And so, I guess there’s this tension. Clearly focusing on door colors is not a productive use of most professionals’ time. On the other hand, due process forums, both very direct and very local, all the way up the presidency, are mechanisms to protect against abuses of power. How do you balance between these two?
Dan Wang:
To give some credit to your friend, at least determining the color of a door is a debate about outcome, not process. It would be much worse if they spent all the time trying to form the committee to figure out the color of the door.
Is it really the case that New Yorkers care most about whether MTA built the subway stations through the correct means and with the correct method? Or do people care about having a subway connection that they believe did not drain their public tax dollars excessively and that gets them where they need to go?
But there is no right answer. Something we have to acknowledge is that the construction of almost anything is going to hurt someone, even a small playground. There are all sorts of lawsuits to prevent people from adding slides to parks because the kids might bring some level of noise pollution, and the slide will create all sorts of hazards.
After we acknowledge that the construction of anything will produce some sort of costs, then the question becomes how do we figure out how to distribute those costs? How do we have an equitable outcome? How do we have something that people buy into, something that satisfies the legitimacy of the program?
The United States has erred too much on the side of the idea that what people most demand is a process in which the state can show that it has checked every single box in the correct order. But is it really the case that New Yorkers care most about whether MTA built the subway stations through the correct means and with the correct method? Or do people care about having a subway connection that they believe did not drain their public tax dollars excessively and that gets them where they need to go?
American lawyers — proceduralists — are excessively wedded to this view that legitimacy is produced through process rather than through the outcome. I think we should have more focus on the outcome.
Danny Crichton:
I used to live in South Korea. One of the most interesting, striking differences from the United States is that there is a public infrastructure lobby and vote. People want subways to come to them.
In Japan, you have a very similar process with the LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, which from the 1960s into the 2000s became known as the cement party or the construction party. There was this triad between real estate, the construction companies, and the politicians to say, look, there’s a virtuous cycle. You donate to us, we will approve the projects. You build them, everyone makes money. Arguably, that’s one of the reasons Japan has a massive debt load and has massive infrastructure costs.
But why doesn’t that loop work here? This is the argument for abundance. It’s a win-win-win, and the only people against it are proceduralists and environmentalists.
Dan Wang:
Well, maybe we need a better class of Yakuza and maybe we need to rename the Democratic Party the “Cement Party.” Yes, there is a virtuous loop, but the lawyers have gotten into the mix at every single one of these steps. We have given excessive veto power to the NIMBYs, who are able to use lawyers to block the construction of wind turbines, block the construction of new homes, block the construction of a dormitory for UC Berkeley. They have the power to break this virtuous loop.
It no longer makes sense for the politicians to promise infrastructure projects, because people are much more interested in protecting their home values than building up anything around them.
Maybe the United States has gotten to a level of wealth where the wealth is so entrenched. It no longer makes sense for the politicians to promise infrastructure projects, because people are much more interested in protecting their home values than building up anything around them. They get nervous about noise pollution or any sort of construction.
You’re right, though. It is quite interesting that elected officials in the United States no longer even seek to promise these things. Why do you think this is?
Danny Crichton:
Well one answer is that these projects take so long to come to fruition. They start with years of planning and permitting. They take years of construction, years of finalization. New York’s Second Avenue subway — we over-talk about it, but the core took about 12 years through multiple mayors. The person who finally got it underway is not the person who gets to show up at the ribbon-cutting. The ribbon-cutting mayor gets lucky, but then whatever they want to commit to, they don’t get credit for it. There’s not a culture of bringing these people back. If you can’t build within your four- to eight-year tenure, there’s no incentive to try to get projects underway. You’re not going to build your legacy around it.
Then there’s the backlash against the infrastructure, too. At the end of Breakneck, though, you talk about Sunset Park. It’s a community in southwest Brooklyn, was an immigrant community for decades and was harmed by a Robert Moses expressway. But it had resilience. It actually rebuilt itself. It is a vibrant neighborhood today. It’s a very desirable neighborhood. Why are some communities able to rebuild and others, like East Tremont in the Bronx, aren’t?
Dan Wang:
If you read Robert Caro, the example that spoke even more vividly to me is Sunset Park. It is this highly diverse neighborhood made up of mostly Latino immigrants and Asian immigrants. It used to be dock workers from Norway, Finland, and the rest of Europe. Caro said that Robert Moses, quote, “Tore the heart out of the community by situating the Gowanus Expressway through Sunset Park.”
If you walk around Sunset Park today, yes, the Gowanus Expressway is a very big thing, this hulking elevated highway that is going through, I believe Second Avenue. But just walk through a few avenues to the east of the Gowanus Expressway, and Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenues are very vibrant places. This is where I am pretty skeptical of the argument that a single infrastructure project was able to do something as violent as tear the heart out of a community. I think that communities are robust and resilient things. They do have the ability to move around and recover.
And I think this is where we get to the heart of the problem with The Power Broker, which is that Robert Caro wrote as a foregone conclusion that New York City would fall. And here we are sitting in New York, we’re pretty close to Union Square, we’re pretty close to the Flatiron Building, and New York is, for the most part, thriving. There’s a lot of people who still want to move here, and I don’t think we can be so reductive as to think that one highway can destroy a community writ large.
Danny Crichton:
We had Yoni Applebaum on a couple of weeks ago for his book, “Stuck.” Americans are stuck and people aren’t migrating. People are very fixed where they want to be. And you might wish there was more of a rootedness that was driving them, but in many cases it’s just economic and a desire to hold onto what they already have as opposed to taking a gamble. I also think about a book called “Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City,” which I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned on Riskgaming. It is a book from an architectural firm focused on Japan, and Tokyo specifically. It looks at yokocho alleys — these sort of drinking alleys — around the train lines that go through Tokyo.
These massive train lines that go through the heart of Shinjuku and Shibuya are the equivalent in many ways of our highways and expressways. And people have actually taken advantage of them. They build housing underneath them. There are businesses alongside them. They start quite ugly, and in fact, they are turned into these really beautiful, functional, utilitarian spaces where the community actually centers.
I also think about this in the context of the EV transition. As we move to more and more electric cars, the pollution around highways and expressways — the undesirable elements — may go away. There’s still the tires and the rubber particles that are coming off of them, but nonetheless, there’s stuff you can do with this. These are constraints you can work with.
Dan Wang:
Japan is supposed to have cemented something like 97% of the Tokyo sea line. Maybe we can agree that 97% cement is the wrong ratio. But let’s get maybe a little bit higher than whatever it is with New York now.
Danny Crichton:
On ratios: Toward the end of the book, you have this discussion where Xi Jinping is 70% right, 30% wrong. In an engineering state where you have authoritarianism, you’re isolated from news, isolated from feedback shocks, the 30% can be extremely harmful when things go wrong because the policies are being enacted without any due process.
In the United States, I would say that the ratio is not 70/30. It is probably lower than that. But nonetheless, there are obviously pros and cons to both countries. You end the book on a somber-ish optimistic note — maybe there’s some magic word in some language to describe that. But you end with the idea that governance seems to be declining in both countries. We’re getting worse data and so on. There’s also this insularity — in the White House, in Tiananmen — that’s narrowing the perspectives of both leaders. And quite frankly, they’re both aging. Trump is crossing the 80 threshold. Xi has gone past his retirement age of 65 and is breaking precedent on how old he is getting within the CCP system.
Nonetheless, you have just a smidgen of optimism. How?
Dan Wang:
If we’re tossing adjectives around, I wonder if maybe there’s a dark magnificence around both the United States and China right now.
I just came from two months of hanging out in Europe, partly to visit family and partly to chill out in Copenhagen and Denmark. There’s wonderful things to say about these mausoleum economies. Europe has so much great food and great art and all the rest. But there is this very strong sense that these countries are not going to change, and these countries very much need change. Europe is now being actively deindustrialized by China. Its companies are under competitive threat with the United States. These countries need new economic models. They need new political models. And yet, I think they’re incapable of change.
For all of the reasons I’ve already stated, I’m very skeptical of the Trump administration. I overwhelmingly think he’s doing bad things to the United States. But Trump’s rise is allowing a lot of questions to be asked. I think his answers are universally wrong. But it is important to ask questions. The United States has pluralism. It has this disruptive dynamic energy. It is more plausible to expect that it can change more quickly than Germany can. And the same goes with China. We can’t take a look at the history of China over the last, call it 50 years, and say that the country is incapable of dramatic shifts.
What we need is to turn both countries’ dark magnificence into bright magnificence.
That was a great listen and dove-tails nicely with The Technological Republic from AC Karp. I wish more authors would spend more time on the difference in attitudes between Americans and our competitors (adversaries is just too loaded). Namely, they want to come up, and for many Americans, we’ve already won so any change can only be for the worse.