Breakneck

Footnotes to myself

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Breakneck, by Dan Wang

Breakneck was a pretty well-noted books of last year. Dan Wang, a technology analyst and writer originally from China, argues a more intuitive way to see the rivalry between the world’s two superpowers is this: China is an engineering state, building vast systems at breakneck speed, while the United States has become a lawyerly society, slowing and blocking almost everything—whether it’s good or bad.

I have already written a piece on this book, which I also recommend you read if you want to understand the book; first how it might affect our future development and methods of social transfer, the second on how we can place Britain within Wang’s model.

Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee-the apex of the Communist Party-had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron--tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory.

Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia.

Chin’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaproiects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers - and prioritizing defense - more than ever.

This is pretty convincing, but one thing Wang misses out of the book is the extent to which China’s domination by engineers is a self-reinforcing loop; because today’s elites are drawn from that pathway, it increasingly becomes the pathway chosen by those who want to be tomorrow’s elites.

The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. 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. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.

There are reasons to be happy for lawyers to have an outsized presence in American society. They are reliable conversationalists at cocktail parties, for example-much better than engineers or economists.

More seriously, they help to maintain America’s civic-mindedness and its commitment to laws. Many of them do important work: facilitating people’s access to bankruptcy, divorce, or immigration services; they help secure civil rights; and they work to protect wildlife and clean water. And the judiciary has a vital function in restraining the executive.

Here is where the lawyerly society shines. We don’t have to worry about the US government imposing the one-child policy or zero Covid, because it would never with the former and could never with the latter. The United States also wouldn’t have caged so many of its tech companies. Lawyers, as I wrote in my introduction, are excellent servants of the rich. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) are indeed very rich. Given the absence of lawyers and a political culture sympathetic to rights, they could find no protection.

And again for the lawyerly society in the US. However, tackling these two issues would likely need a separate book each.

The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth-environmental destruc-tion, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests-the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.

As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers.

Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person’s relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals.

Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping-heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

China today resembles the United States of a century ago while it was proving itself to be a superpower. But America’s construction boom slowed down after the 1960s. What happened next? The lawyers.

In the 1960s, parts of the United States had grown into a frightful place. Oil platforms discharged petroleum into the sea, a foul smog settled over cities, and factories leaked so many chemicals that seven rivers combusted. Urban planners rammed highways through urban neighborhoods. Legal discrimination segregated people by race and blocked them from exercising the right to vote. The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners (who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials (who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam), and industry regulators (who were cozying up to companies).

Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “Sue the bastards!” (referring to government agencies).

Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems.

I find it hard to see China developing anything like the environmental consciousness of America in response to its environmental danger; not just because there are no elections and the brutal repression of the state, but because China has already taken massive strides forward in managing its environmental situation, and because much of the environmental damage has already been offshored, as in the case of Chinese fishing fleets stripping African coasts etc).

The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the problems of the United States in the 1960s. It has also produced two complications that weaken the United States today.

The first is an elevation of process over outcomes, In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.

While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures. In a seminal paper titled “The Procedure Fetish,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley outlines how the federal government requires an agency to “conduct every conceivable study, ventilate every option, engage every identifiable stakeholder, and weather the most stringent judicial review before any of its actions, however triv-ial, could take effect.” In the lawyerly society, a more rigorous process is the solution to any number of quandaries. To deal with a new problem, it designs another procedure, which usually entails longer bureaucratic deliberation, greater public discussion, and more intensive judicial review.

Lawyers have much more scope with the law to stop something rather than create something. Before a government agency can build anything-from simple things like a bike lane to more complex projects like California’s high-speed rail—it ties itself down with mountains of procedure. The agency has to check so many boxes because it knows that a lawsuit could derail that bike lane if people are able to convince a judge it didn’t study environmental problems hard enough.

After exhaustive research and review, it is no wonder that little ends up built. Americans are left with decaying infrastructure, little new construction, and a deep sense that nothing is working.

As the physical environment degrades, it’s hard to see how elites break out of this loop - the answer is, likely, that electorates will force a decisive change by refusing to accept the attendant decline in living standards, as we are already starting to see.

It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end up themselves, such that people grow obsessed with its logic and forget about the outcome. Because who can keep the goal straight after the seventh monthly committee meeting?

The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off. Lawyers are too often servants of the rich. They help wealthy homeowners block construction projects or get creative with their taxes. It is sometimes puzzling to follow along intellectual property cases, many of which seem to be a thrilling and intellectual game invented for lawyers. American judges have to deal with bewildering disputes, like hedge funds pursuing sovereign governments on debt payments. Litigation offers endlessly tantalizing possibilities for settling scores. And motivated parties are willing to pay top dollar for superstar lawyers. Lawyers aren’t just defenders of the rich; many of them are the rich. “On Wall Street, Lawyers Make More Than Bankers Now” was a headline from the Wall Street Journal in 2023. “Pay for Lawyers Is So High People Are Comparing It to the NBA” claimed the New York Times in 2024.

America’s dysfunctions are not obstacles for the rich. Though New York City has barely been able to extend its system of mass transit, real estate developers have been able to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy. Though California can’t tame wildfires, the rich might be able to afford their own private firefighting services. The poor-those buried under paperwork trying to apply for SNAP benefits, who have to take dilapidated public transit and who would most benefit from new construction—are the ones who suffer most from the lawyerly society’s failures.

The first two paragraphs touch on the fact that the lawyerly society ends itself to the formation of distributional coalitions of those most able to navigate the system, who can then entrench themselves via proceduralism. Wang is right that the Americans are worse than us, but wrong to say by a lot. Britain has the highest number of HR employees in their workforce; that is a similar, albeit not identical, problem.

On the issue of the blockages not being an issue for the rich; this will also likely drive forward popular resentment against eco policies; if people can feel their lives getting relatively worse - not just in comparison to their previous situation, but to others - that resentment offers a ready problem for anyone to offer an easy solution.

The lawyerly society doesn’t have such dramatic shifts. It is made up of democracy, pluralism, vetocracy, and not only these things. The lawyerly society also includes a commitment to proceduralism and protecting wealth. Economically, the United States has experienced strong economic growth relative to other Western countries combined with astonishingly successful corporate value creation. But in political terms, this obsession with process over outcomes has made Americans lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives. I want the US government to earn back that faith. To do so, it will need to recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites. It will require the United States to build again, creating a momentum and the sense of optimism for the future that many Chinese have felt over the past two decades

Part of the problem with mass democracy is that, as Weber identified, the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups, and the people who rise to the top in that system are primarily (often only ) skilled in communications, who are best able to argue the case for their particular interest group. One of the most pressing problems we face in Britain is to break up this over-reliance on communications and the professional distortion it causes; this is why Reform’s decision to bring in people to the Cabinet via the Lords should be welcomed.