China Is Run by Engineers, and the US by Too Many Lawyers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-15/what-the-us-can-learn-from-engineering-in-china

by JumpCrisscross • 11 months ago

56 41 11 months ago

bloomberg.com

bigyabai• 11 months ago

But if you deregulate America, then you inherently create a market where lawyers rule. I'm fine with the status-quo.

JumpCrisscross2• 11 months ago

But if you deregulate America

...how does building more and putting more engineers in positions of power mean deregulation?

To the extent the article has a position on this, it's for deproceduralisation. Not deregulation per se.

yetihehe• 11 months ago

Implementing rules made by lawyers|engineers makes good environment for lawyers|engineers.

Deregulation implemented by lawyers|engineers makes good environment for lawyers|engineers.

Deregulation implemented by politicians or laypersons doesn't make good environment for engineers or lawyers. So yes, not all deregulation and not all regulation will be good for engineers.

Putting engineers in positions of power will mean that engineers will make and remove laws that are good for engineers. When engineers are happy with rules, they can FINALLY go do what they want which typically results in engineering products, which most people like after lawyers say things like "no, a steel sword is not a good educational toy for children". Reality is not simple.

aspenmayer• 11 months ago

I can’t really put my finger on it, but I think there’s a kind of sandbagging going on on vote-weighted social media sites, where folks in favor of the status quo make really incongruous or non sequitur statements as a kind of red herring bullet sponge for corrections, because they may suspect that the good corrections will get downranked by proxy when their own comment gets downvoted.

I see similar things in sports, where leading competitors intentionally lower their performance in qualifying rounds so that they get a better seed advantage and easier competition going forward in the bracket.

Have you seen this before on HN or online generally? I’m seeing it more online lately.

ronsor2• 11 months ago

It's awfully bold to claim that the US is obsessed with making rules, and China isn't. China is similarly full of rules (in fact, likely moreso), but they have less rule of law, so they aren't enforced consistently. The US has more rule of law (for now), so enforcement is (was) more consistent.

And of course, if anyone's too good at making rules, it's the EU.

hilbert422• 11 months ago

"It's awfully bold to claim that the US is obsessed with making rules, and China isn't."

Of course China is obsessed with rules just like many countries are, and it's pretty clear it firmly polices its laws.

The difference is that after the death of Mao in 1976 Deng Xiaoping consciously and openly embarked on a task to pull China into the modern technological era, and to do that he deliberately set out to populate China's Politburo with highly educated engineers and like. (I gave references to this in a HN post a short while ago.)

Thus, for nearly 50 years China has been run by the best brains available rather than those who've the gift of the gab and promise the electorate whatever it takes to get them elected.

Sure that's not democracy and many of us in the West find it irksome. However, like it or not, over the last 50 years China's rulers have run a command economy and worked an economic miracle.

Deng Xiaoping's insight of getting the best and brightest to run the country was brilliant, unlike most dictators he chose a course of action that actually benefited China. There's no question about that, the evidence is there for all the world to see.

kelseyfrog• 11 months ago

Which poses an interesting consequence.

It's not exactly controversial to generalize HN's sentiment that the US would be better off with more engineers and experts in elected office, which all other things being equal, implies that the US should be more like China.

insane_dreamer2• 11 months ago

The problem is that it’s more of a dictatorship now with Xi than it was after Deng. It’s not longer the best and brightest but those loyal to Xi. That’s how you got highly capable people like Li Keqiang sidelined and many others purged altogether on “corruption “ charges. A benevolent dictator can be beneficial for a country in crisis (the original Roman idea of a dictator which was a temporary position), like you could argue Deng was, but it’s not a good model for long-term governance.

metalman• 11 months ago

china is obsesed with principals, from which rules can be derived in order to facilitate the realisation of those principals China makes a consistant policy of stateing the principals they are trying to follow and how they are doing that, like every time they stand in front of microphones, and lo, it is actualy working. The problem for us, is that the people in front of microphones here, use similar language, and we all stopped listening a long time ago, as it is just talky talk noise, and we are only concerend with who gets the money. China has scale on it's side, and they are lifting people out of the 16'th century, litteral mud brick dirt floor shacks, and moving whole villages into new apartment complexes, together, where they can go or stay, or go back and forth and continue to farm, and so there is a vast number of people, loyal to the state, and the jobs they get, and the astonishing oportunities that they can persue, should they have the wet ware and gumption......more engineers then, many more engineers, working on many more projects..... a litte known story, sometimes told in different ways, is of a very ancient temple built to honour the worlds first engineer, named Gun, which sits on an island in the middle of the headwaters of the yallu, who is credited with building the first flood control engineering for that same river, some number of millenia, ago though truth to be told, the mesoptaimians were at it first, but we have only there ditch digging songs and flood laments to remind us of what needs to be done first

aurizon• 11 months ago

The USA is run by too many dummies, China has a far higher number of graduates in tech, although China also has many 'purchased' degrees - the hiring of a winger to pass exams

laughing_man3• 11 months ago

Well, okay. But China also has a lot of environmental and governance disasters. One thing lawyers help do is protect normal people from large companies and government officials who exceed their mandate.

Would you be okay with companies near you just dumping toxic waste into the local rivers?

tstrimple2• 11 months ago

I don't know what you're talking about. That is the current reality in the US. We have no recourse.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/disastrous-figures-show-poverty-i...

Runoff and soil erosion continually pour dangerous chemicals into bodies of water statewide. The pollution starves fish of oxygen. It causes organic material to grow that threatens to sicken humans unless drinking water providers spend huge sums on decontamination. It similarly makes water unsafe for recreation. This spring’s heavy rainfall ended years of drought — and it also, as predicted, led to levels of nitrates in rivers above or near the highest on record.

laughing_man3• 11 months ago

I don't know what you're talking about either. Farm runoff is a whole different beast than mercury compounds or cyanide.

gnerd002• 11 months ago

We have no recourse.

This is just misinformation. This is an international board. Many readers will take this as fact. There are courts and there are laws on the books, and yes many cases are enforced. Not "enough" for some, "too much" for others.. it is a "Goldilocks Problem" .. comparing the situation across the USA does not make a lot of sense either, since State's Rights historically have played a big role.

dumah2• 11 months ago

No, on the balance it is lawyers who protect companies from the people they harm and lawyers who constitute the government officials who perpetually exceed and expand their mandates.

Most of the senate are lawyers and it’s the most frequent occupation of a legislator.

laughing_man3• 11 months ago

You're letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good" here. If the alternative is China, where a mid-level bureaucrat can decide the public good outweighs your health, I'll take the lawyer-filled US.

vunderba2• 11 months ago

Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient. The vice president of Taiwan from 2016-2020 was Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) - a man with a DOCTORATE in epidemiology.

The last time the United States had a presidential figure with any kind of STEM background was probably Jimmy Carter (bachelors of science and served as a navy nuclear engineer) - nearly 50 years ago.

Barrin92• 11 months ago

Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient

I think it's pretty related on the cultural side. If you look at how Taiwan succeeded, it's basically two fold. On the population's side it was willingness to follow orders, wear masks, get tracked using a smartphone app if you were sick and they were pretty damn strict about this. In particular mask wearing is a common courtesy in much of East Asia long before covid.

On the tech/politics side they were lucky to have people like Audrey Tang. But let's put it that way the chances that the US put a trans hacker who writes Perl implementations in Haskell for fun in a top cabinet position and for Americans to accept East Asian levels of collective discipline is well, not looking to good to put it mildly

vunderba2• 11 months ago

Great points. Another reason masking wasn't all that unusual was the prevalence of two-stroke engines in scooters (at least back when I lived there) which tend to put out a bit more pollution.

DiogenesKynikos• 11 months ago

The mainland Chinese response to Covid was very similar to the Taiwanese response, but the media perception of the two was completely different.

tamimio• 11 months ago

[flagged]

vdupras• 11 months ago

Common accepted knowledge around here is that greed is good and that capitalism works because of it.

Fine, let's accept it.

But here's my pet theory and here why I think we see cracks forming up in this "greed is good" mantra (which, frankly, hurts common sense of anyone living in a judeo-christian culture, because, well, isn't greed a sin?): this only works in a world of expanding EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment).

This cheap energy is basically a giganormous pool of energy slaves. As long as there are slaves to capture, greed is good because it's good for everyone to capture and distribute as many slaves as possible.

When that pool dwindles, greed stops working as well as it did for the advancement of public good and it begins cannibalizing on it (the public good). It still gets accepted as a truism today, but it will soon go back to sin territory.

linotype3• 11 months ago

The anti-US sentiment is exhausting. If you don’t like the US, stop using our technology and our markets.

saubeidl2• 11 months ago

Those two are directly related. The common thread is US imperialism.

linotype3• 11 months ago

As if China isn’t also building towards that same position.

JumpCrisscross2• 11 months ago

anti-US sentiment is exhausting

How is saying America should have more engineers in positions of power anti-American?

linotype3• 11 months ago

It’s a well known issue that’s been beaten to death.

os2warpman• 11 months ago

stop using our technology and our markets

That's exactly what's happening. Like, it's happening before our very eyes. Right now.

Hubris, arrogance, and entitlement led us here and the world is taking your suggestion to heart.

raincom• 11 months ago

https://archive.is/tdtMy

Gibbon1• 11 months ago

If you know your history the US has always been run by lawyers until about 50 years ago when it started being run by MBA's and Finance Capitalists.

rorylawless• 11 months ago

Who went on to train the lawyers and judges in the MBA/Friedman orthodoxy.

saubeidl2• 11 months ago

*ideology.

powerapple• 11 months ago

People in the US thinks it is a bad thing that US is run by lawyers? I would argue differently. The real difference is that China is a developing country, and US is a developed country. China should focus more on growing the pie and US should focus more on sharing the pie, hence lawyers to set up rules and regulations.

Grace2025Rachel• 11 months ago

From my experience, Chinese engineers listened to CCP - they are engineering tools for their ruler. For example, the Three-Gorge dam project was opposed by many geologists and scientists. But the party wanted so the engineers helped the party. There are many such examples. The impact assessments are mostly fake so nobody really take these serious like we do in the West.

China Is Run by Engineers, and the US by Too Many Lawyers

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