China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-america-is-run-by-lawyers/

by m-hodges • 10 months ago

164 277 10 months ago

freakonomics.com

bearjaws4• 10 months ago

I think its less a problem of lawyers and more a problem of age.

I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.

If you've worked retail you know many above 75 are not all there, plain and simple.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...

bdangubic4• 10 months ago

60 should be HARD limit for any politician (including scotus)

delusional• 10 months ago

Why would there need to be a hard limit on something the electorate is already directly voting on? You might say every election is an election on if people above X age should be in congress.

ricardobeat2• 10 months ago

Benjamin Franklin would like a word with you (signed your declaration of independence at 70), as would Churchill, Picasso, Enzo Ferrari, Mother Theresa and a thousand others…

jordanb• 10 months ago

One thing I've realized it that the Democratic party is a machine. It rewards loyalty and waiting your turn. It punishes getting out of line and challenging incumbents.

Parts of the Republican party are too of course (hence Grassley) but it's been the target of several successful insurgencies. First the tea party and then Trump. Now it's turning into something completely different.. a cult of personalty for a dictator.

But the intact machine is the reason why the Democrats can not rise to the occasion. Their whole system is one designed to produce dour grey apparatchiks.

regularization4• 10 months ago

DP is corporate funded and exists to squash movements from the left. Most people have to see this up close to see it though.

regularization4• 10 months ago

I remember in the 1970s when the Soviet Union was called a gerontocracy. Gorbachev becoming general Secretary at the age of 54 was seen as a breath of fresh air. As your chart shows, one third of the US Senate is over the age of 70. We have people like Biden and Trump as president. Sign of the times (who are respectively 10 and 7 years older than Xi). Incidentally, Xi is the oldest member of the Politburo Standing Committee.

AnimalMuppet• 10 months ago

Only one third? I'm highly surprised that it's that low.

ourmandave• 10 months ago

...anyone above 75 is not all there, plain and simple.

Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.

But yeah, Grassley needs to hang up the spurs.

lm284693• 10 months ago

It's not ageism, people deciding the future of your country shouldn't already have a foot in the grave

Just look at Trump and Biden speeches VS Bush or Obama

frmersdog2• 10 months ago

"Muh ageism" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for these kinds of conversations. You have to make an effort to actually argue against the statements you disagree with. Are people 75-and-older agile and flexible enough, mentally, to perform in these positions? To connect with the constituents they represent? If the incidence of the requisite acuity does indeed drop with advanced age, are the individuals in government disproportionately among those who avoid issues? And, if so, how do you know?

bearjaws4• 10 months ago

Totally fair to call out blanket “anyone 75+ isn’t all there” as ageist. But the governance point still stands: even sharp octogenarians are often out of sync with modern life (platforms, tech norms, digital risks). Only 8% of adults 65+ say they’re online “almost constantly,” vs 48% of 18–29 a proxy for how different the information environment is that shapes decisions.

serf• 10 months ago

Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.

we take it for granted that someone below the age of 15-ish in the United States shouldn't be behind the wheel of an automobile, but that's not universally true. We try 18 year olds as adults, and that's not universally true, either.

It isn't a far leap to presume that people past a certain age meets the same psychological and mental/cognitive decline as the average person that age without testing.

You wouldn't expect a 95 year old to be eagle-eyed and athletic, to presume that their age isn't a deficit whatsoever is ageist from another perspective.

If I saw a person using a wheelchair I wouldn't wait for them to tell me that they needed a ramp for the staircase at the restaurant -- this too is -ist, but I see no real problem with it as a wheelchair user myself.

Somewhat similarly : the amount of 'with-it' and sober 95 year olds that I have met in real life makes me really question their fitness as an important member of a government group. Just like the presidency, these roles should probably be qualified into by participants with more than just votes.

If you're a 95 year old that passes the mental health and physical health examinations, more power to you , welcome to <government group>.

CamperBob24• 10 months ago

If you're too old to staff an airport control tower, you're too old for Congress and especially the Oval Office.

Not just because your faculties aren't what they once were, but because you have no stake in the outcome of your decisionmaking.

linhns• 10 months ago

How can you expect them to legislate for the nation when they know they won’t be around when the policies come to fruition?

master_crab• 10 months ago

There is another sort of old age the US suffers from. The government is now amongst the oldest nation-state organizations on the planet with probably the oldest written national laws (the constitution) still in use.

The cruft that has built up (from the 2nd amendment, to the electoral college) over 250ish years is a serious problem.

shakna4• 10 months ago

with probably the oldest written national laws (the constitution) still in use.

The UK would easily disagree, with their founding codification in 1215.

DSingularity• 10 months ago

I doubt that’s the problem. The public policy government is captured by corporations. The military policy arm of the government is manipulated by a myriad of interests operating indirectly from the shadows — ranging from foreign intelligence agencies (ie Israeli) to military/industrial companies.

Old so competent senators barely matter. It’s all about unelected corporate boards and secret groups within influential government agencies.

saubeidl• 10 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_San_Marino

San Marino has you beat, but obviously quite different scale.

t-34• 10 months ago

The sheer bulk of the law is a huge problem, but there are very clear and well thought-out procedures for amending the Constitution. Cruft is all the felonies and misdemeanors you commit just commuting to work every day, not the Constitution, which can be read and more or less understood by anyone literate in a few hours.

snapplebobapple• 10 months ago

The second amendment is literally the specified solution, not the problem.

mattmanser• 10 months ago

Do they teach nothing of European history in America? Magna Carta? Basically the inspiration behind your constitution?

1215, still a few parts left as enforceable law today. If you think US institutions are old, try European ones. We're still supposed to practice longbow on Sundays.

America is middle aged, at best. You haven't even changed regime yet. Only every been a republic. Never changed religion.

How cute. Poor old Spain has been back and forth with absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republics and even a fascist dictatorship thrown in the mix.

smsm424• 10 months ago

That's not a "problem" and not a "cruft" - it's how it was built by design. You may not like it - your right, of course, but don't pretend it's because it's "old" or "out of date". If the framers were alive right now, they'd insist on the same framework, and maybe made it even more robust, given how eroded those principles became over the years. They had a very particular set of ideas, how the relationship between the state and the people should work, and those ideas didn't change with time, they are still very actual and often at the center of the discussions. You may not agree with them - there was a lot of disagreement among the framers, and people who argued with them, too - but pretending you understand more just because you were born later is just arrogance. People 250 years ago weren't stupid.

teddy-smith3• 10 months ago

My grandma is 80 and speaks 7 languages and is a professor and teaches classes.

She's smarter than me.

What you just said is agist.

rileymat22• 10 months ago

There are incredibly smart and talented 12 year olds that are not allowed to vote due to age. Agism is pervasive in our culture, old and young, so we should ask if the discrimination is pragmatic or not. Moral or not. Legal or not.

bjourne• 10 months ago

Omniman strikes again! https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1k3mqvs/the...

g42gregory• 10 months ago

There is a saying that, in China, the top political career starts at 70.

I don't think the age is the problem. It's corruption.

AndroTux• 10 months ago

Luckily there’s no corruption in China

tokioyoyo6• 10 months ago

To be fair, corruption is also a problem in China. But still the consequences are much higher, if you think of province-level book-cooking and what happened to their leaders.

The incentives for policy making are much different in both countries.

horns4lyfe• 10 months ago

Ya they’re all old lawyers

johnisgood• 10 months ago

We have an age limit in so many fields. Being in congress should have one, too. Aging affects many parts of our brain (negatively) responsible for cognition.

jasonsb• 10 months ago

It's lawyers. Definitely lawyers and copyright laws. You could also add corruption and age, but these are problems that can be found in China as well.

FpUser• 10 months ago

"anyone above 75 is not all there" - this is pure BS

But yeah allowing Chuck Grassley to run at this young </s> age is pure insanity.

micromacrofoot• 10 months ago

if we have a federal retirement age we should just use that

atmavatar• 10 months ago

It's about more than just whether a congressperson is all there or not.

A bigger concern to me is that many of them are old enough that any long-term impacts resulting from bills they pass simply won't happen until they're gone.

And, I would expand that to include more than just Congress - I think major executive offices (e.g., President, VP, cabinet members, etc.) and the Supreme Court should have an age limit for the very same reason. Anyone in government office whose decisions can have long-lasting effects should be young enough they need to keep that in mind.

Anyone who (statistically) has only a few years left to live and especially anyone past the average life expectancy are welcome to hang around in advisory roles, but they should have limited (if any) power to directly affect future policy because they simply don't have any real skin in the game any longer.

xyzzy123• 10 months ago

Isn't family "skin in the game", in a fairly literal sense?

People don't come from nowhere, they have families, affiliations, communities etc. Politicians in particular are selected for this.

ugh123• 10 months ago

Both can be true. Old lawyers are probably the worst

general14652• 10 months ago

Old people are voting for old people, because they are not going to vote for kids. Does not matter that the "kid" is 45 year old who is much more attached to everyday reality than old people.

Gibbon1• 10 months ago

Up until 40 years ago the US was run by lawyers. Now the US is run by MBA's and financial capitalists.

fathermarz• 10 months ago

It’s less about them being “not all there” and more like the level of disconnected they are from modern society. The last time they had the average job (if ever) was before credit cards existed and it was $0.50 for a loaf of bread.

mcphage• 10 months ago

Many above 75 aren’t all there, but that doesn’t say anything about a specific person.

ajross• 10 months ago

I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.

The age of the senior senator from Iowa is like 537th on the list of major problems this country is facing.

I mean, let's be real. Would a bunch of spry 30-somethings in the senate have prevented the Assault on Tylenol or the coming invasion of Portland? Seems beyond dubious.

smsm424• 10 months ago

There are 13 Senators, out of 120, who are over 75, as far as I can see. I don't think we can attribute all the problems to them - there's not enough of them. I mean, some of the elders in Congress - like Pelosi, Waters, Nadler, Durbin, etc. - would do well to retire, but not every single one of them is "not all there". By a coincidence, I've met one of those 13 about a month ago (not personally, on an event, but it was a small event and I could see and hear him very well) and he certainly wasn't a youngster but I didn't see any obvious degradation of mental facilities. That said, I don't think term limits and mandatory retirement age is such a bad idea for top politicians, just don't expect it to fix much.

elteto5• 10 months ago

Nope, China is run by the Chinese Communist Party, which itself is run by Xi. That's it. Just look at Jack Ma for a clear example that China is not run by engineers or tech people.

tern• 10 months ago

As far as I know, this isn't true. Many members of the CCP have engineering degrees. A relevant podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1TeeIG6Uaw

elteto5• 10 months ago

What exactly isn't true? That Xi doesn't control the CCP?

And presumably they also have doctors and even lawyers in the CCP! Come to think of it, I wonder if China is not actually run by lawyers as well...

chvid• 10 months ago

Alibaba being told to drop their fintech ventures and instead focus on deeptech (semiconductors and ai) is one of the clearest examples of China’s leadership of engineers setting priorities.

elteto5• 10 months ago

That is purely driven by national security priorities, I mean, _clearly_. The engineering is just how you work towards meeting those priorities. If it had been making candy or melting ice then you can bet that's what they were going to focus on.

metalman• 10 months ago

look into the nitty gritty of the cultural revolution, and it's very specific focus on technology

jack ma got a modern day "re-education" tailored to his specific circumstsnces, but as always in these situations the offer is "lead? or gold? your choice!"

hermitcrab9• 10 months ago

look into the nitty gritty of the cultural revolution, and it's very specific focus on technology

As I understand it, the cultural revolution was mainly about young people running amok and victimizing teachers and authority figures. All orchestrated by Mao so he could cling to power. What did it have to do with technology?

pessimizer2• 10 months ago

Could you please update your references? China has been run by Mao's enemies for a very long time (likely longer than you've been alive), and the Cultural Revolution was a desperate ploy to consolidate power when the current way of Chinese thinking was growing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticize_Lin%2C_Criticize_Con...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader

_4ti6• 10 months ago

Yeah I think the better metaphor is China is run by one person, and America is run by a set of rich people and rich companies pursuing various profit and pet interests.

elteto5• 10 months ago

I think that is a good starting point.

tokioyoyo6• 10 months ago

That is a very naive way of looking at things. There’s Politburo of 7, and even if we ignore other high rankings, provinces have huge amount of control over the way they’re ran. There are like 1.4B people in the country, it’s kinda funny to imagine that everyone just works and acts the same way.

SilverElfin2• 10 months ago

But the CCP does promote based on merit and accomplishment for the most part.

vitorgrs• 10 months ago

So, you are saying China is run by a chemical engineer? Xi studied that at Tsinghua University.

metabagel5• 10 months ago

Nailed it on the head. China is a dictatorship.

gwbas1c• 10 months ago

I listened to this podcast earlier this week, and yesterday listened to another in the series exploring the difference between corruption in the US and China.

It's always good to learn how other cultures govern themselves. China learned a lot from the US and other countries, adapted, and then benefitted immensely. In the US, we can learn a lot too.

sigfubar• 10 months ago

In the US, we can learn a lot too.

Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.

Animats• 10 months ago

That's well known.

On the other hand, DOGE didn't go a great job running America.

kklisura• 10 months ago

IMHO, DOGE's result wasn't an engineering strategy to run a country, it was a businessperson's approach to running country.

atemerev• 10 months ago

"Data grab" is easier to write.

bearjaws4• 10 months ago

DOGE was an attack on every agency that MAGA didn't like.

The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.

SilverElfin2• 10 months ago

Well DOGE also ran into a lot of obstructionism, and had to also move quickly due to the short political cycles America has. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is fundamentally bad.

NegativeK2• 10 months ago

I suspect, strongly, that we disagree on the fundamentals of what DOGE's aim was.

ocdtrekkie2• 10 months ago

If DOGE was actually trying to make things more efficient, it would have made very different choices. Firing thousands of workers that you still have to pay for half a year is not efficiency, it's massive waste. Not only did DOGE not actually save money, it burnt a ton of money breaking things our government now has to fix.

Even if they had taken an extra month to learn the systems they were cutting into, would've saved many months of wasted employee-hours with what happened.

daveguy2• 10 months ago

doge is a purposely incompetent and corrupt shitshow.

Gigachad• 10 months ago

The concept was fundamentally bad though.

bigyabai2• 10 months ago

You cannot even say for certain what DOGE did, your only source is being politically biased.

adverbly2• 10 months ago

At best doge was engineered cost cutting.

Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.

Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.

bushbaba2• 10 months ago

Engineers are cost cutters. Half of engineering is making decisions on how to build within budget. Building within tolerances and not overly engineering things

fuzztester• 10 months ago

Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

that's too much of a blanket statement.

as bushbaba said in a sibling comment, (paraphrasing), engineers can be both builders and cost cutters. and engineering is about tradeoffs of various kinds, even if they don't involve cost cutting.

ever heard of:

- value engineering

- frugal engineering

google them.

my dad was an engineer. not a software one, but a mechanical and electrical engineer. he did a double degree, from a well known US university. and worked for a few years in the US. then he came back to India and work for a single US multinational for the rest of his career.

once when I was a teenager, I saw him reading a book titled "value engineering". a us publication.

i think he mentioned it to me and said it was a good book.

I also read parts of it and found it interesting.

edited for grammar.

mwkaufma6• 10 months ago

Freakonomics: laundering conservative talking-points into "the npr set" for 20 years and still going.

tacitusarc• 10 months ago

The conservatives I know think it’s another mainstream democratic mouthpiece.

So I guess they’re doing something right.

mwkaufma6• 10 months ago

No, just sounds like you know some dense conservatives.

asdff3• 10 months ago

A broken clock is right twice a day. America has some of the highest numbers of lawyers per capita by far out of developed nations. These lawyers do not work for us, most middle and low income people do not get legal representation that they need at all. You learn where these lawyers actually work when you work in corporate, and you see quickly how this single department has complete unilateral control over all operations of the organization. Everything goes through them and they can shut down anything. Even directives by the chief executive officer who is supposedly at the helm are crafted by legal.

And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.

metabagel5• 10 months ago

Law is central to government. It makes sense for most politicians to have a background in law as opposed to, for an extreme example, real estate.

xmonkee• 10 months ago

This is why everyone should have at least a basic education in materialist analysis. Our material relations dictate the structure of society, not the other way around. China is a manufacturing economy, that's why it's run be engineers, and America is built on exploiting the productive capacity of the rest of the world, so of course there's lots of lawyers.

fhrjfbdhdhd• 10 months ago

Are you implying that left wing ideas are always correct, and right wing ideas are always wrong? That seems very naïve, no?

ocdtrekkie2• 10 months ago

I am not sure this makes conservatives sound great. They talk about how absolutely self-defeating Trump's policies are towards reshoring efforts. Freakonomics seems pretty genuinely centrist to me.

mwkaufma6• 10 months ago

If you think Chicago School economics is centrist, then "centrist" is just another word for conservative.

bbor2• 10 months ago

America is run by entertainers, at the moment…

herval• 10 months ago

as it was repeatedly in the past (Reagan, Schwarzenegger and a bunch of others local officials). Circus sells.

bbor2• 10 months ago

True, though having unelected entertainers running e.g. the DoD, FBI, and Medicare is something new, I'd think!

ummonk• 10 months ago

Not any more it isn't. America is run by influencers now.

hinkley• 10 months ago

And failed reality TV stars.

metabagel5• 10 months ago

He’s a successful reality TV star, and he has turned our whole political system into a reality TV show.

I like to think that the job of the president is to take care of the nation’s business so most of the rest of us can get on with our lives, but Trump demands constant attention, and he continually invents emergencies which prevent us from being able to just go about our existence in peace.

The never-ending narcissistic distraction is exhausting.

hermitcrab9• 10 months ago

Lawyers and accountants. Just look at the way that once great engineering companies like Boeing and Intel have been run into the ground by bean counters ('financialization').

fluidcruft• 10 months ago

I generally just have this growing opinion that capitalism is fundamentally about lawyers and accountants. Capital is ultimately nothing more than paper or numbers and worthless in the real world without lawyers and accountants.

terribleperson• 10 months ago

It's neither the accountants nor the lawyers, in my opinion. In my experience, both accountants and lawyers tend to be non-prescriptive - they tell you how things are, options, and likely outcomes.

The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.

criticalfault• 10 months ago

Aka mba

NoboruWataya2• 10 months ago

Muilenberg had an engineering background.

stackskipton• 10 months ago

Having Engineering background does not mean you can be captured by financial forces.

FranzFerdiNaN• 10 months ago

Makes sense though. Capitalism demands ever growing profits, and there is more money to be made in wealth accumulation and investments than in building things.

_DeadFred_3• 10 months ago

Boeing moved their headquarters to D.C. Their management doesn't care about the product, managing design, manufacturing, that is a side detail that someone else takes care of. Management cares about something else detached from the rest of the company.

hn_throw_250926• 10 months ago

Old but good.

pessimizer2• 10 months ago

It's the difference between people who understand that the physical world is real, and a bunch of innumerate conmen. Both of them might rob you, but the latter will often end up killing you both in the attempt.

baron816• 10 months ago

Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct.

This is kind of the criticism that’s provided in Abundance. American Progressives intentionally made it extremely difficult to build anything by giving everyone a veto to block anything they don’t like.

There’s a lot of people on the Left (Center Left, at least) who want to revisit this approach and make it easier to build things again.

I also want to note that they point out that the current administration has a policy of scarcity. Even if we get rid of a lot of regulation, tariffs, deportations, and high government deficits make it hard to buy materials, hire labor, and finance projects.

fooker• 10 months ago

There’s a lot of people on the Left

Great, I guess then it won’t be too difficult to name ..say.. five prominent politicians who have made this stance clear?

davidw2• 10 months ago

The governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, has been very pro-housing. She liked my 'legalize housing' hoodie so much she wanted a photo with it: https://bsky.app/profile/tinakotek.bsky.social/post/3lkea36k...

majormajor4• 10 months ago

In California Gavin Newsome has talked it and signed some stuff loosening CEQA, we'll see what happens with SB79. As for four more - just grab some of the authors/supporters of SB79.

righthand2• 10 months ago

The bigger issue might be confusing “progressives” with “NIMBYs”. There are plenty of people across the political spectrum that want to build more as well as people blocking the building. Progressives particularly are aggressive on the desire for more housing. Literally to the point that Nyc and other large cities see huge handouts to developers (even when those developers continuously under deliver on affordable housing).

davidw2• 10 months ago

The NIMBY/YIMBY divide really doesn't fall along traditional political lines. There are very progressive people who are raging NIMBYs, as well as very conservative NIMBYs. There are both progressive and conservative YIMBYs too.

linguae• 10 months ago

It depends on the progressive, however. Yes, I’m hearing more calls to build from progressives. However, for a long time between the 1960s until the past few years, there were two drivers of NIMBYism that progressives championed: (1) local control of neighborhoods and (2) environmentalism. The first was a reaction to urban development plans of the 1950s and 1960s that fundamentally reshaped neighborhoods, but often in ways that did not consider the residents of those neighborhoods. For example, San Francisco once had a historical Japanese American and African American district named The Fillmore with plenty of Victorian homes, but this was largely demolished in the 1960s and replaced with housing projects and a widened Geary Blvd. While I’m still on San Francisco, there were plans in the 1950s to build a network of freeways criss-crossing the city. This was deeply unpopular.

Unpopular plans to dramatically reshape urban cities led to “freeway revolts” (organized, grassroots opposition to freeway projects, which sometimes succeeded) and increased local input over planning. The second was brought on by environmental crises in the 1960s, such as badly polluted rivers and the famous oil spill near Santa Barbara. California, especially its coastal areas, was quite affected by both drivers of NIMBYism, and this became the dominant way of thinking from the 1970s onward.

Local control over neighborhoods sounds reasonable, but unfortunately it’s led to neighborhoods being museum pieces that do not scale upwards to meet demand, thus incentivizing urban sprawl. Restricting development had also significantly boosted the property values in those areas. However, urban sprawl directly conflicts with environmental goals, since it requires more transportation infrastructure and more energy to move people across longer distances than across shorter distances. Thus, we end up with situations where homes get built in far-flung exurbs whose politicians support growth (until the towns get large enough to where some residents want to halt growth to “preserve our quality of life,” thus pushing development to the next closest area friendly to development), environmentalists blocking road-widening and other infrastructure-improving efforts in an attempt to stop/discourage the sprawl, and NIMBYs blocking the construction of denser housing near job centers that could have provided affordable alternatives to exurban housing.

This has been the story of California since the 1970s, and the obscene housing prices and unsustainable mega-commutes are a result of this. Thankfully more people are seeing the consequences of 50 years of broken housing policy, and we’re finally seeing some efforts, even if they’re baby steps, to address this.

andy99• 10 months ago

Canada is like this (possibly worse). Nobody ever wants to do the ostensible thing that they say they are doing, if that makes sense.

Take some kind of government procurement, say to buy a truck. The truck ends up being a pretense for all sorts of political things like regional development or righting some perceived historical inequality, doing an environmental study, subsidising some industry that's not doing well. Nobody cares about actually getting the truck.

I can imagine a world where they just buy the best truck and don't try to make it a pretext for wealth redistribution and solving all the worlds problem, but I've never seen it.

Multiply this by every single things the government spends money on (and in canada the oligopolies as well) and you see why nothing happens.

regularization4• 10 months ago

1% of people make decisions of what to build and how in any real sense. A movement ("abundance") to exclude the other 99% from having a say is not a left movement, the left is the opposite of that. Only in the US where class relations are so lopsided on the side of the heirs over the workers could that idea be called left.

trhway• 10 months ago

American Progressives intentionally made it extremely difficult to build anything by giving everyone a veto to block anything they don’t like.

It is reaction to the old situation when interests of a small guy were completely tramped by the big guys - ie. the situation of private profits, public losses. And we can't go back to it.

The first step to move forward is to give everybody, whose interests are negatively impacted by a project, a stake in the project's benefits/profits. Ie. private profits - private losses, and public losses - public profits.

thrance2• 10 months ago

The "Left" has never held any meaningful power in this country. Blaming the Progressives for this sad state of affairs is not only completely wrong, it's extremely disingenuous.

If you're speaking of the Democrats, they've been following the Neoliberalist playbook to the letter for decades: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes. This (the housing crisis) is the direct result of their half-competent technocratic stewardship of the economy. (And let's not spare the actually malevolent Republicans from sharing the blame in turning this land from an actual country into a billionaire's playground).

This "Abundance" movement is to be taken as a rebranding of the same tired and destructive Neoliberalist policies, and nothing else. It is ported by the same old people and politicians that have been slowly running this country to the ground. There is absolutely nothing new to be found in their manifestos: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes.

Housing can either be affordable or an investment vehicle, but not both at the same time. Actual leftists understand this very basic premise, but the astroturfed Abundance "movement" remains blind to it. Left-wing populism is slowly gaining ground in the face of an extremely complacent and ineffective Democratic establishment, and Abundance is a last-ditch effort to sold democratic voters on the same garbage they've been eating since the 1980s.

pnutjam• 10 months ago

The one thing Democrats and Republicans always agree on is "No Progressive's allowed".

metabagel5• 10 months ago

It’s not progressives. It’s NIMBYism, which is cross-party.

jacquesm4• 10 months ago

The USA has two right-of-center parties, and no credible left-of-center party. That they call it left and right is a massive misdirection and should not fool anybody, but unfortunately it does.

lkey3• 10 months ago

The abundance folks are Reagan Era neolibs and conservatives. They want to 'revisit' an imagined past. The reality is they wish to retvrn to is the exact moment Reagan and Clinton broke the New Deal. We must first remake a Deal to break it once more, they're skipping steps.

Their proximate goals are to break the remaining unions and environmental protections we have, in service of the 'free market' which definitely is real and important. They want to give up on 'social issues' like access to reproductive care, medicare for all, and supporting the marginalized.

The speaker list includes the AEI, The Manhatten Institute, R street, Niskanen Center, etc...

American Leftists and Progressives do not hold power and the 'barriers' that abundance claims exist were put in place by those with power, not AOC or Zohran or whatever local cabal they point to in the book. Cherry-picking Austin as their exemplar is worth its own comment, but the book is frustrating across the board.

Klein has missed every moment of late and I expect the trend to continue.

Regardless, if your primary critique on a lawless and deeply authoritarian administration is their 'policy of scarcity', then you have utterly lost the plot. Mussolini made Italians grow and eat rice to induce a feeling of scarcity, there is no doubt, but that is not anyone's primary critique of his tyranny.

4ndrewl2• 10 months ago

Is the answer "you only need lawyers if you don't live in a totalitarian state?"

DangitBobby• 10 months ago

How is not being run by lawyers the same thing as not needing lawyers? You think it's impossible for the US to be run by non-lawyers?

4ndrewl2• 10 months ago

No, I think it's impossible for China to be run by lawyers.

syntaxing• 10 months ago

Odd lot has a good episode on him too!

NegativeK2• 10 months ago

How do we have political topics in this forum without the discussions devolving into quick quips and rhetoric?

jopsen• 10 months ago

This is a tech forum, and we like to think engineers make the world.

But it's quite possible that the rule of law, capitalism, freedom, democracy, western institutions, etc. is what allows engineers to build stuff.

Technology advances when it is financed.

NoboruWataya2• 10 months ago

Yes - full disclosure, I am a lawyer, so I am biased and perhaps sensitive about this stuff. But I see a lot of this kind of tribalism on HN. Engineers can do no wrong, lawyers and accountants can do no good.

tokioyoyo6• 10 months ago

By the way, the main point of the book is “China needs more lawyerism, America needs less of it” if that makes you feel better. A lot of people seem like didn’t read it before discussing it, but a good chunk of it discusses problems in Chinese structure as well.

majormajor4• 10 months ago

It's the same thing you see in companies. Once you have something built that is making you comfortable, you get complacent and protective. And there's nothing sexy about maintenance.

(For instance, China wants to build best-in-world industry and infra, which they didn't have before, but they are not running their government in a growth- or building- engineering-driven sense. Not a lot of move-fast-and-break-things iteration there! Lots of people comfortable and protective of that system.)

intalentive• 10 months ago

China is run by the state, which employs the engineers.

The West is run by finance capital, which employs the lawyers (and buys the politicians).

There was a post here a while back about engineering grads in the UK who couldn't get engineering jobs. So they ended up working for quant firms and banks instead.

Under neoliberalism the economy ends up oriented away from productive activity and toward rent-seeking and wealth transfers. Hence the growing gambling "industry", the pump and dump crypto scams (run by heads of state, no less), the legally protected private cartels like banking and medicine. We get people like Vivek Ramaswamy who became a billionaire while producing nothing of value.

Pinning these massive systemic issues on lawyers is frankly stupid. They are just one piece of the puzzle.

treis2• 10 months ago

I don't think this is really true about either country. America builds plenty. When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.

hollerith• 10 months ago

I agree. Also the US seems to be smarter about what to build: the US has not built cities the size of Manhattan that stand empty year after year like China has.

pengaru• 10 months ago

When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.

https://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140515737/california-turns-to...

immediately comes to mind

tokioyoyo6• 10 months ago

Theoretically you’re right. But having read the book, I agree with the general thesis. Things just move so much faster in China when it comes to making or building anything. Like I know firsthand people whose towns were converted from run-of-the-mill village to a T2 city in the span of a couple of decades. When hundreds of millions of people experience major change in their lives in front of their eyes, it’s a nit different than waiting for 5 years to start a new bridge across the river. I’m not even talking about factories, or policy course-corrections, or long-term goal settings either.

You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.

AuthAuth• 10 months ago

Its easier to upgrade a city when you can just move people out of their house. In the west its a nightmare to get anything changed because people own their spot and dont want to leave.

treis2• 10 months ago

Faster is something of an arbitrary standard because speed is almost always a trade off with efficiency. A lot of China's speed comes down to cheap labor and inefficiently allocated capital.

roncesvalles• 10 months ago

Also, the obsession with public transit coverage and walkability as some sort of benchmark for how well your country is doing is at best misguided and at worst ableist and ageist.

Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.

When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".

doom2• 10 months ago

Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living.

Is it though? I'm for public transit because one day I'll be of an age where I probably shouldn't be driving but am still able and independent enough to get around.

In a car-centric culture, what's the solution? Making the elderly take taxis or rideshares everywhere (assuming there is taxi services or Uber available where you live)? That feels like an ageist tax unless those services are heavily subsidized somehow. Or allowing the elderly to drive, which in my experience can be its own hazard both to drivers and everyone else.

_DeadFred_3• 10 months ago

Imagine your entire access to the world is decided by an insurance company and their willingness to insure your driving in old age.

When my mom was dying of cancer she was lucky our small town has a public shuttle bus system. She was not able to drive herself to her cancer support group at the end.

When my very poor grandparents came to visit in Santa Cruz they could not afford a rental car. We took the bus everywhere. I have so many memories with them thanks to public transportation. My grandfather had a very very painful artificial hip.

tayo42• 10 months ago

Its a long podcast, I'll respond to the title lol

But I would probably say America is run by mbas, not lawyers.

canjobear• 10 months ago

This is less because of any special attitude toward governance, and more because the only university degrees you could get during the Cultural Revolution were in engineering.

FergusArgyll• 10 months ago

That would be an indictment of engineers! luckily it's a silly caricature

tnt128• 10 months ago

A lot of people here focus on the political side of this topic, so I want to share an engineering perspective instead. At the core, solving any problem really follows the same pattern: first you figure out what the problem is, then you set up a way to measure it, come up with a possible solution, and test it against your measurement. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t, try something else. The key is just running this loop quickly enough. This process applies no matter what kind of problem you’re tackling—engineering, politics, or social issues.

The U.S. has this loop at the company level. China has this loop at the local government level.

In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.

If the U.S. really wants to build this kind of feedback loop at the government level, voters need to judge election candidates based on their track record, not just campaign rhetoric. And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.

I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

For example, GDP used to be the main measure of success. That pushed local governments to chase higher GDP numbers at all costs—regardless of whether the projects were actually practical or useful. This led to overbuilding, unnecessary construction, and even ghost towns.

orwin3• 10 months ago

I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Chinese "democracy" is not one from our viewpoint, but from their, an oligarchy this large (10% of the population vote) is the perfect balance between democracy and their old imperial system.

When they coined "Communism with Chinese characteristics", in the west most people focused on "Communism", on all side of the political spectrum, but what's really important was "with Chinese characteristics".

prewett3• 10 months ago

Having lived in China, the whole control part that's part of Communism (and Chinese dynasties) drove me nuts. The market economy part, though, that was great. In the late Hu years China seemed like a place where you could get anything you wanted (special order? no problem), and every Chinese person seemed optimistic. I gather that feeling has changed (by increased government control, it seems), which is sad, because it was a great time.

I share the article's interviewee's opinion that Americans and Chinese are similar, I came to the same conclusion. I think China has so much to offer the world, and Americans could easily think of it sort of how we see the UK. The reactions I get from Americans when I mention I lived in China makes me think that Americans want to love China. Kind of the way that the "otherness" between men and women acts to attract. (And also to make relating difficult.) Unfortunately, the Communist engineering the human soul is completely at odds both with flourishing humanity and American's rampantly individualistic culture.

Spivak• 10 months ago

And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.

I think we have this already. Sure, if you go looking for it you can find any brand of stupidity you want—and if you want to sell a narrative when you find it you put a camera in front of them. But on the whole we have this. The problem is that the two dominant political parties have fundamentally incompatible visions for the country's future. And, at the national level, that's what we end up voting for. One of these visions has to win and both candidates need to share it before voters can evaluate the individuals. Even in primaries the metric for success isn't the best candidate but who has the best chance of winning in the general.

Pulling back the curtain winning the vision for the new US Right is likely to be a long drawn out fight because for many issues the opposition is a kind of person, e.g. the gays, women, who won't ever "move on" or accept defeat and so will require ongoing active suppression. It's why I'm sad to see Moderate Republicans pushed into obscurity because it seemed for a while there they were within spitting distance of a unified vision.

seanmcdirmid3• 10 months ago

In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.

China is very decentralized though, Beijing has the ultimate say but their attention span limited. So they maybe set targets, or step in when a huge scandal happens, but most localities are fairly far away from Beijing’s attention. While China doesn’t have America’s federalism, it basically has it by default to deal with its huge size. Every city has different rules, taxes, they have their own local champions, imagine if every big city in the USA had their own auto producer, for example. Hukou means china’s illegal immigration is mostly internal. If you become homeless in Beijing or Shanghai, they will just deport you to whatever village your hukou is in (well, free train/bus ticket at least, but you probably came to the big city because you couldn’t make it in your village in the first place).

maxglute3• 10 months ago

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.

more_corn• 10 months ago

No, bullshit artists.

thisislife2• 10 months ago

I wish people who write such stuff would first work in a political system and understand what politicians actually do, and the constraints of their political systems they work in. No, America's problem isn't because of lawyers in power or lack of engineers in power. It's simply about the political system - the US is a federal democracy and the Chinese an authoritarian one-party State. An authoritarian state that isn't answerable to the people can do a lot of things that a democratic one simply cannot (at the same pace) because a democratic country first has to reach a consensus with all the stake holders involved.

Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.

This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.

bigyabai2• 10 months ago

Nothing you just said is really about the political system, though. America has plenty of politicians willing to cross the red tape, but they only do it for personal gain.

The economy is always what it boils down to. Americans see factory work as hazard duty, and you can't exactly take untrained vagrants and put them on the construction site. If you want Americans to build you things, you have to pay them an American wage. Otherwise the market economy doesn't work. China isn't burdened by any of this, not because they're authoritarian but because their economy is planned. If they want to make cars domestically, it doesn't matter what Mexico charges for labor - whatever the state says, goes.

curious_riddler• 10 months ago

I don’t think either Trump or Modi is known for waiting to reach a consensus with all the stakeholders involved.

prewett3• 10 months ago

And people complain about both being a danger to democracy.

raxxorraxor2• 10 months ago

It is wrong that autocracies don't have the same problems, perhaps or probably even more significant. The premises are wrong. If we think all politics stream down from Xi, you would be mistaken. The largest threat to him are his own party members and that is true in every autocracy.

So instead of making some grand technocratic beneficial decisions, the decisions are mostly oriented towards keeping you in power. A power that is very fragile. At times that still might net sensible policies, but the same is true for democracies who have to deal with public opinion. Democracies have the benefit that even a mob (the public) has some capabilities for learning.

The solutions to domestic manufacturing would be solved completely differently in both countries because the problems are different. A large factor is simply labor costs for developed nations for example.

I don't think there is a solution aside from import/export taxes. If that is true, is Trump secretly a good president? Perhaps not, but you would need to come up with solutions yourself. A democracy where a public just demands solutions is ineffective, but so are most if not all more autocratically governed nations.

constantcrying• 10 months ago

China is run by people with a long term plan of becoming a world superpower through industrialization on a gigantic scale. The US is alternating between two rival factions, who's number one goal is reversing the effects of whatever the other faction did. My home country, Germany, is a total clown show which still hasn't decided if it wants to keep being an industrial nation.

It really is very easy to figure out who is going to come out on top.

NalNezumi• 10 months ago

I listened to Dan Wang on this podcast [1] and found his talking points around industrial policies interesting. His take around how China managed to do capitalism better than US when it comes to EV & Solar panels (if he's not wrong):

massively fund the industry as a political / social objective, set (artificial) demand and create a local market by restricting import / competition for a while, then cut funding gradually when there's a sprawling eco system of startups, letting them brutally cannibalize each other leading to consolidation (such as BYD) to create global leaders.

Is not uniquely Chinese but are just tactics out of Japan, Korea and even Germany (historically).

I can kinda understand the point that this process works better when there are some technical people in power, such as engineers. They can probably reason timing and industry a little better: Solar was pioneered by US but industrialized by Germany but then out competed by China.

Yesterday at a conference I came to know the history of bipedal/quadrupedal robot development by a MIT professor, claiming most of the Chinese robots are just descendant of that technological choices made by MIT research.

Humanoid robotics seems to just be in that process of "massively fund the industry" in industrial policies (I saw so many humanoid robot companies at the conference, Chinese, that I haven't even heard of). To me I guess the "why now?" is the question, and I guess some technical person must've been in the process of making that decision.

We can't really emulate the political system of China, but that mindset of having technical/expertise close to power is probably something we shouldn't forget. Especially in a era where political positions seems to be handed out based on loyalty than merit

[1] https://youtu.be/ZNK3vNg13XA?feature=shared

karmakaze• 10 months ago

I watched the same podcast/interview. Dan Wang expresses his views in a very neutral tone, only on the things he knows. There are some subjective statements, but they seem balanced to me and didn't find anything that was hard to believe.

rchaud• 10 months ago

Does it matter if American elected officials are often lawyers if they don't read the bills they vote on? [0][1]. Or if the bills in questions often contain language copy-pasted from lobbyists' memos?

This topic runs the risk of being reduced to the same "Humanities v STEM" binary that so much of US public discourse has been reduced to. The real point of discussion should be that an engineering background may instill a political culture more focused on risk aversion, efficiency and longevity. A lawyer-heavy political culture may end up in the arena of "let's see what we can get away with".

Do these highly simplified stereoptypes apply to contemporary America? I'm not sure if an America led by the likes of Zuck, Ellison, Andreessen etc would end up differently from the one we see today. Whatever particularly genius they were able to leverage into massive wealth, they are all ultimately subservient to the same national culture of short-term gains, popularity contests and superficial macho posturing that afflict the political class.

What goes unsaid in this podcast is that a large number of CCP officials have a military background as well which inherently instills a a long-term view of governance, whereas the most successful American politicians with a pro-military stance (GWB, DT) have routinely denigrated rival politicians who served their country (John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth) while maintaining, not coincidentally, a low profile while in public office.

[0] https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/penn-statim/dont-be-silly...

[1] https://www.heritage.org/commentary/congress-read-it-voting

dylanzhangdev2• 10 months ago

我是一个一直居住在中国的中国人，今年快40岁了。个人观点，我觉得这篇文章的最核心的观点已经错了，中国自古以来没有由工程师管理过，一直是官员，在古代是读书人，是士，工匠是贱籍。即使现代，工厂里是官员说了算还是工程师说了算？如果是后者，就没有那么多国企倒闭，没有下岗潮了。你可以去街头随便调查100个人，你问问他们觉得国家是谁在管理？

----------

I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.

anal_reactor• 10 months ago

There are people who think that China is about to replace America as world's obviously dominant superpower, and there are people who think that China is about to collapse, nothing in-between.

tuatoru• 10 months ago

China;s history has been one of repeated 300-year to 500-year cycles. But this time is looking more like slow decay everywhere, true.

Collapse? People need to know and understand Adam Smith's remark that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

BobaFloutist• 10 months ago

I think it will probably do neither, though as an American we're making a good faith effort to ensure the first.

fancl20• 10 months ago

As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.

maxglute3• 10 months ago

Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.

there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.

Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.

Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.

stuartjohnson12• 10 months ago

"Iron rice bowl" (simplified Chinese: 铁饭碗; traditional Chinese: 鐵飯碗; pinyin: tiě fàn wǎn) is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security,[1] similar to life tenure. Traditionally, people considered to have such positions include military personnel, members of the civil service, as well as employees of various state-owned enterprises (through the mechanism of the work unit).

For my fellow westerners.

singularity2001• 10 months ago

But there is a difference between officials/managers and lawyers (?)

dylanzhangdev2• 10 months ago

我觉得在HN上面，很多黑客过于天真，对威权国家抱有梦幻滤镜，因为他们离得足够远。所以，此类文章，隔三差五在首页出现。

而对于一直生活在这里的人们，这是两回事。有句笑话说，我可以捐款100万，因为我没有，但是我不能捐一头牛，因为我真的有。

----

I think many hackers on HN are overly naive, holding a dreamlike view of authoritarian states because they're so far away from them. Therefore, articles like these appear on the front page regularly.

But for people who have lived here their entire lives, it's a different story. There's a joke that goes, "I can donate 1 million yuan because I don't have it, but I can't donate a cow because I actually do have it."

bithead• 10 months ago

America was founded by lawyers

cadamsdotcom2• 10 months ago

One factor is how much agreement is needed to get going.

It’s a lot easier to agree what should get built when

a) you can point to wealthy nations and say “lets try to have what they have”

and

b) you’ve seen projects go fast and deliver big in your own country done by people just like you.

By contrast in the US it’s often a debate over which incremental improvement to make and why; without unilateral clarity on outcomes or value.

This “run by lawyers” / “run by engineers” claim is a symptom of that difference - it’s a byproduct, it’s not the core problem needing solving.

seanmcdirmid3• 10 months ago

Hu and Jiang were engineers, but Xi isn’t. After the schools re-opened, he was rushed through an accelerated program at Tsinghua and given a degree in chemical engineering, and then went off to be an official full time never actually doing any engineering work. He is a pure official like his father, and unlike his predecessors, never even bothered learning a foreign language.

As much as I think of his background and his authoritarianism (getting rid of the two term rubber stamp for the presidency), he has actually delivered for China. This is the most dangerous part: imagine if Trump was actually smart, if he actually delivered, we would be really confused about democracy.

smsm424• 10 months ago

If that is true - which I don't think it is - then I am happy I live in a country run by lawyers. I am not a huge fan of lawyers, but at least lawyers do not put millions of people into concentration camps and don't disassemble them into organs. Maybe it's appropriate to call those people "social engineers" but I wouldn't like to be a subject to that kind of engineering.

eesmith• 10 months ago

The Soviet Union Politburo also had a lot of engineers. "43 percent of Politburo members attained higher education credentials during their life, while in a close second place, 32 percent of members earned an education in technical engineering." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Par...

FWIW, Brezhnev was a metallurgical engineer.

While I think the Soviet Union comparison would be relevant to the article, the only connections I could find are:

At various points in China’s recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering, and this was engineering of a very Soviet sort.

and

... what the Chinese are interested in is being an engineer of the soul, which is a phrase from Joseph Stalin that Xi Jinping has recently repeated.

Note that Stalin's phrase is, more fully, "As comrade Olesha aptly expressed himself, writers are engineers of human souls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_of_the_human_soul

and Xi Jinping's is:

"In 2018, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, stated that “Teachers are the engineers of the human soul and the inheritors of human civilization. They carry the important task of spreading knowledge, spreading ideas, spreading truth, shaping soul, shaping life, and shaping newcomers. The fundamental task of education must be nurturing capable young people well-prepared to join the socialist cause. Better education and guidance are needed to build the noble ideal of Communism and the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics among the students.”"

That comes across as less top-down or state-controlled than implied in the text, and more metaphorical.

psadauskas• 10 months ago

In the US, around the turn of the last century, it used to be that if you had an idea for a new invention, you could wander into any mid-sized city and have your pick of a dozen different a machine shops that could make you a prototype. It was an incredible time for innovation in this country, and a big part of the boom that led to the US ramping up from zero to the largest producer of war materiel in WW2.

That's how China is now. Any decent city will have machine shops and plastic injection molders and electronics makers, everything you need to get a new idea off the ground. They spent the last few decades stealing every good idea from the West, just like the US stole every good idea from Britain and Europe 120 years ago, and now they're well into the transition of being the innovation hub of the world.

fragmede• 10 months ago

I'd go a bit further and say it's not just access to a machine shop than makes it. I don't think I'm belong pedantic, but manufacturing has evolved since the 80's. If it were just access to a team of people with a couple of machines for metal, those aren't that difficult and those still exist, albeit far fewer of them. What China does have is one stop prototype to full stack mass manufacturing places. For even the simplist device, a machine shop won't do. You'll need (powder coating) painting, packaging design and manufacturing, and shipping. The attitude of the US machine shop is that it's your problem. "We're just a machine shop, you gotta deal with the rest yourself. Which, I mean, fine, but I don't want to become an expert in manufacturing products. My specialty is writing code for my product. Meanwhile, China's got a one stop shop to take my prototype that I ghetto rigged with cardboard and duct tape with a breadboard, and make iterate on a professional protoype with me, and then take it to a mass manufactured product I can sell to consumers, with a smile on their face. The Americans are going to make fun of me to my face for not knowing the difference between 316L vs A500 structural tube. Now, one could argue that I need to develop thicker skin, but fuck that. China's gonna do what I want without being a bag of dicks and help make me a pile of money. So tell me which one you'd choose.

tsoukase• 10 months ago

How can we conclude anything about China without knowing its political internals, business culture, detailed proceedings and anything else we might need right away?

myroon5• 10 months ago

He also wrote this recently:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-amer...

China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers

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