That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
"I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyer"
I can't speak for china either, so I looked it up and indeed, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao worked as a hydraulic engineer before becoming a politician.
Well in germany we had Merkel as a doctorate in quantum chemistry (but she never worked as an engineer, but neither did
Xi Jinping).
I certainly would prefer politicians with some engineering background, unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine.
Yeah I'm pretty nervous about engineers in charge. Merkel is interesting because her dad was reverend in the East. My reading of her is more that she was smart and there were good options in physics/chemistry - but then she effectively went right into politics directly afterwards. For better or for worse she never had that 5-10 years of day-to-day work before politics.
She is the most hated EU politician in whole eastern part of EU, a symbol of EU failings and main reason there are many EU-sceptics across whole region.
A lot of current/recent crisis and utter dependence on russian gas and oil was her doing. She desperately tried to appease putin at all costs despite him mocking her from time to time, she pushed long term underfunding of German army despite war on Ukraine happening since 2014, closed down nuclear plants too fast so coal energy was needed immediately and so on.
Shame on her to be polite, not a good example if you want to show that engineering background (just studies in her case) can lead to better outcomes than lawyers.
The german army was never underfunded. It just enjoyed lots of luxories, like lots of management staff instead of combat troops and custom made special equipment (that often failed to deliver) instead of buying what the market offered.
Dan came off as very China biased and Tyler literally schooled him on a few occasions.
But despite that, there are grains of truth in what he said, we have lawyers turned politicians at the helm in the US, so we have a great democratic system but on the flip side hardly any engineers leading us to the predicament we are in now, where nothing ever gets built.
And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.
Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
Coincidentally, FDR's predecesor was an engineer and we know how that presidency went (not that it was entirely his fault, but he didn't make things better either)
These people are just trying to find an alternative narrative because the vast majority of the population have been rejecting neoliberalism for a good 30 years now. So they spin up the foreign enemy is better than us, so we need to deregulate more and not hold monopolies accountable.
If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!
In the west greater education doesn't lead to people wanting to live in a factory compound in communal dorms with suicide nets where they can be woken up at midnight to start a shift on a whim. Doesn't lead to people wanting to eat all their meals in a cafeteria with the other people on their shift. The factories I visited even their children went to school in a school within the compound.
I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.
Sure, but it's seemingly doing less and less. "Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP" has been going downwards for a long long time, here is the last twenty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA
I don’t think you can take “percentage of GDP” as an indication that the US is doing less. It could be doing the same amount while the GDP grew tremendously in other areas, for example software.
This is roughly 2.9% a year over 20 years, so slightly ahead of inflation over the period.
To me this points to a story where manufacturing grew slightly but the other parts of the economy grew a lot more. Not exactly a bear case on manufacturing, but not a tremendously exciting one either.
When politicians talk about the decline in manufacturing what they mean is jobs. I work in American manufacturing and there are tons of amazing projects happening but the decline in jobs is real. Especially low skilled jobs, This trend will only continue and I doubt any politician, regardless of thier background, can change that. And I’m not sure it’s a bad thing as it means manufacturing productivity is increasing
The main reason it’s so political is the drop in number of jobs has been huge, and too fast for many to adjust. Automation has come fast.
“ Manufacturing employment declined from 17.3 million in January 2000 to a low of 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 33% over the decade. Compared to the peak of 19.5 million in 1979, manufacturing employment had declined approximately 41% by 2009.”
There's a long-term economic problem looming around the loss of jobs: which is that most people's ability to command a share of our economic output (i.e. earn money) is tied to their value as a labourer. If that labour is no longer needed by those who control capital and thus allocation of labour resources (which is increasingly the case across many segments of our economy), then we end up with an economy where people increasingly struggle to earn a decent living.
Of course there are areas where that labour would be useful: healthcase, teaching, childcare, elderly care all come to mind (and there are many other examples). But our economy is not set up to enable this. The problem isn't supply side (difficulty retraining people to do the jobs), it's demand side: the people who need these services often don't have the money to pay for them. So the jobs are badly paid.
And it's a downward spiral: as wealth becomes more concentrated, demand for labour drops because those controlling the wealth already have their needs met and often don't care about the needs of others.
If history is anyhing to go by, then this will eventually lead to war and/or revolution.
At the end of the day the reason people see manufacturing as special is because in a war it is a strategic resource. If this wasnt the case nobody would care about "manufacturing jobs" any more than the general economy. So if you use defence production as your metric... "U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Is Consistently Over Budget and Delayed Despite Billions Invested in Industry"
> Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
Think of it as engineers vs non-engineers (lawyers/mba types/etc). We complain about that on here all the time (ex. boeing). It's where the priorities are: is it on making things better or making more money? In an ideal world, it would be both. Unfortunately here, it is not otherwise enshittification would not be a thing.
It feels like people accept this criticism when it props up their position - for an American (software) engineer, companies run by _American engineers_ vs companies run by American non-engineers is an obvious case of engineering is better (see criticism of Boeing); but when it's Chinese engineer vs American non-engineer, the "American" bit is more important.
It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
That's better than a culture that sees every transaction solely in terms of corporate profit and doesn't consider the existence of trade offs at all.
The result is that far more people get far worse deals far more of the time. Healthcare, the jobs market, education, climate damage, grift in high places - it's all the same issue, and a lot of the problems are rooted in denial of reality on spurious "economic" grounds.
>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
It's one of those just-so stories that sounds like a nice neat explanation. You can't put the complex reality into a neat single sentence so nonsense like this is always going to win.
You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
You're providing much too much credit to China's government, the dynamic is simpler:
China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.
We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
> We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?
> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
for 2023 us vs china workplace fatalities per 100.000 are 3.5 vs 3.0 in favor of china. (quick ai query)
in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...
aye. the old elite of China were overthrown by the communists, whose (that is, Mao's) decisions starved most of the country, followed by the insanity of the cultural revolution.
the new technocratic leadership is just that -- new. really only started happening in the 1980s and 90s.
the US is falling apart due to the entrenched hyperwealthy seeing more and more rents. China's hyperwealthy are all new money and are not entrenched yet, not the way groups like Ford or Boeing or Goldman Sachs are. But soon they will be, and soon the CCP will start prioritizing their needs
For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
> If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
Sure. There's always going to be someone opposing something. But I'm not aware of cases where a disagreement in an environment good for everyone was large enough that it caused the leadership/government collapse. Similarly on a small scale, the number of grumpy people at companies I worked at scaled more or less with how good things were for everyone.
In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.
Foreign state-actors love to sow discontent in enemy territories. It doesn't matter what they say to rile up the population and cause instability -- they'll just do it.
Social credit system is not really a thing. Yes various apps have various ‘credit scores’ and if you are convicted of crimes you can get travel limitations, but there is no such thing as a ‘social credit system’. Much like how the government is not centralised at all, provinces can make their own laws and so on.
I believe the premise is that you have to oppress the rich to a certain extent to prevent them from usurping the people's government for their own ends.
Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old.
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
i dont have.. and nobody talks about it.. in china.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
If no one talks about it, why is this .gov.cn article discusses the problems currently posed by the existing social credit system? There isn't indeed a nation-wide score, but given the size of Chinese municipalities (often larger than most countries in the world), it's far from anecdotal.
There is a credit reporting system, similar to the one in the US. However, most people are not affected by it in their daily lives. Only those who are in serious financial trouble and cannot pay off their debts are placed on a blacklist, which restricts them from traveling by high-speed rail or flights.
Yeah, I was on my way to being convinced that my understanding was a misconception, but this just halted that in its tracks. You’ve just stated the slippery slope has been built and is ready when desired.
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
There's a social credit system everywhere. It's called "money". It's quite literally and explicitly a credit system that rewards certain behaviours and castes and punishes and disempowers others.
The fact that everyone in the West is used to it doesn't alter the fact that it's social engineering at scale and not a law of nature.
Dude come on, the US already has a social credit system. Where do you think China got the idea of credit scores from? Try getting a good loan in the US if your credit score is under 400. You're barred from having certain jobs if you don't have a good credit score.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
It's not just loans and banking. Bad credit severely limits your housing options, even rooms for rent are running credit checks these days. Some employers too, even in roles where you aren't directly handling money or anything close to it.
I understand this, but I meant that the data sources used to build credit scores are mainly banking/debt related. Jaywalking ore saying slurs online won't affect it, unlike in China.
*not yet. And if you are not US citizen and coming in as a tourist, what you write applies heavily and can end up in properly harsh treatment. So its not as rosy as you write (which already ain't rosy)
The difference between a social credit score and a credit score is when you criticize the president, your social credit score goes down, but your credit score stays the same.
The people who have been stalked and apprehended by ICE for online criticism of what ICE is doing might not agree.
As might visitors who are being asked to show five years of social media history to make sure their views are politically acceptable.
Free speech is over. If dissent isn't being actively punished - the current push for deanonymisation is coincidental, no doubt - at the very least it's heavily throttled algorithmically.
If that were the true secret sauce of the economic success in China, why had it not taken off before the 2000s? Like, they have been that "aligned" and "want the same thing" and "run by engineers" since the 50s, no?
They did. Developmental state for huge country = phases measured in generations. 1.4B can't get away with building a few industries like other tigers, JP/SKR/TW/SG who can capture a few highend and do fine per capita.
TLDR timeline
50s-70s was soviet engineers / knowledge transfer from post war wreckage. Built basic industry, 80s-10s was relentlessly building out every industrial chain for every sector except leading edge because lack talent. Talent pipeline was 90s-00s building out academic system, 2010s-20s was brrrting tertiary talent. Couldn't brrrt tertiary talent without teaching peasants literacy in 60s, and then having literate parents in 80s family planning (i.e. one child policy) which filtered generations of 1-2 kid households where surplus went towards education/tertiary. All the recent highend progress recently was result from that, step by step building on generational phase/timescale. PRC only passed US in total STEM a few years ago, now they on trend to talent inflection point 2x-3x STEM vs US in next 20 years. People mock one child policy, but it was exactly choreographed for this outcome, one of few cases of generational peasant to phd planning, though 50 year foresight to build up greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, not 100 year foresight because cost is shit TFR in the next 50 years.
It kind of did. GDP per capita grew at around 6% per year from 1952-1980. It was starting from such a low base that it was still pretty low in 1980, but it was much improved. And Mao was not an engineer.
6% compared to the post-2000s is mediocre, especially given the low baseline. Not remarkably better than other high-income democratic countries like Japan and West Germany. Even the US can have ~4% growth at the time.
This topic has been discussed on Chinese forums and social media for like 1 million times. The short answer is it did. To give you a prefect example - the J-10 fighter jet was first tested in 1998, it shot down multiple best EU made fighter jets last year.
> it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing.
Actually, this is very hard because different individuals want different things. Normally you need a mechanism like the market or democracy to aggregate individual preferences. Expecting a dictatorship to do this well seems optimistic, and the full history of communist China doesn’t support the idea.
There's a decent amount of research that finds a correlation between engineering degrees and terrorists:
> According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution. It was a finding the authors reached with caution and even a certain resistance. “We are social scientists,” Hertog explains in an interview, “so we are always seeking socio-economic explanations. We accepted this idea that there might be personality traits, expressed first in choice of profession and then in political ideology, very reluctantly.”
> This article demonstrates that individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent among violent Islamists worldwide than other degree holders. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.
As an engineer, I do think there’s some mild but noticeable correlation in bulk. But there are other categories which would be much more predictive. And most of the correlation with engineers are actually a confounder effect from things like multigenerational socioeconomic status, or religion.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
I am electrical engineer and electrician working in regulated areas. In both areas the frameworks limits my choices and obviously I am very authoritarian. There is no room for discussion. If I need a DC DC converter for 2 amps I will pick one rated for 4 amps. No discussions! If I need to install a heat pump 60 feet away I will pick 5x6 square millimeter cable and all the circuit breakers from installation manual. There are no options or opinions. I communicate this in polite way to the clients.
And this flows in other areas. If I need a functional vehicle with cheap upkeep I optimize for it. I invest in low risk products since the income is limited. I know that people with plan and confidence are scary, you don’t meet them every day.
Eh. Maybe. But I do see people who are pretty consistent when they have power. It may be somewhat unpredictable before they get power, but somewhat more predictable once you’ve seen how they act with it.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
Libertarian principles encourage relationships built on mutual consenting parties rather than coercion. This implies that both parties have the freedom to choose. Imagine being stuck with a small dating pool of undesirable partners, the choices may not be good but that doesn't make it authoritarian.
Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...
No, central planning is key to the state capitalism employed by China, it is done on ALL strategic industries.
They just no longer do any central planning on nonsense matters like how much ice cream need to be produced for the summer and how much coffee shops are required for Shanghai.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...