Why China Builds Faster Than America & The Rest of the World | Dan Wang
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I would like for The US to be 20% more engineering. I think that it you know, that's how you get a little few more homes constructed and wind turbines and solar and mass transit as well. And to recover some of this engineering muscle that has, it has lacked for quite a while.
Just 20%. That's not bad.
Seems low.
Just 20%. That's good enough. I'll take it.
We're we're close. Right? I guess we're we still have that DNA here. We just need to polish it.
We just need to, you know, work out and, you know, work out these muscles and and get stronger again.
Bankless station, Dan Wang is the author of Breakneck. It's China's quest to engineer the future. We've got a lot of questions about China here today. Dan, welcome to Bankless. Hey, Ryan. Good to be here. Okay. So the central idea of your book is that The US is kind of a lawyerly type of society, that China is more of a a builder engineer society. Can you break that down for us? What what do you mean by this?
Take a look especially at the elites of both countries. I used to be a fellow at the Yale Law School when I was really felt like I was, surrounded by all the future aspirants of the White House, who who who really wanna become president one day. And so these are people who are, very smart, fun, interesting in all sorts of ways, but especially very ambitious. And indeed, The US, is really run by lawyers. First 16 presidents from Washington to Lincoln, 13 of them were lawyers. Every single nominee of the Democratic Party between 1980 to 2024, most recently with Harris, had gone to law school. Mu
And part of the argument of your book, Dan, is that this turns into the respective, like, way of life, like The United States way of life. It's kind of downstream of the fact that we have lawyerly political elites and then respectively in China that whatever the Chinese way of life is of which me and Ryan are very unfamiliar or at least we haven't experienced it ourselves. Whatever the Chinese way of life is is downstream of the fact that Chinese leadership has always just been engineering coded for decades now. Would you could you elaborate on that perspective as well?
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