https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
https://credit.fgw.sh.gov.cn/xyyj/20220902/8693d5ba378d4f578...
They can even revoke your passport (which is functionally the same thing as some forms of travel only accept a passport).
So, you're both doing the pointing spiderman meme here.
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
The fact that everyone in the West is used to it doesn't alter the fact that it's social engineering at scale and not a law of nature.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
It's the same category as: Why would a company with happy well paid workers be worried about unions and try to stop them forming.
Have you met people?
In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
As might visitors who are being asked to show five years of social media history to make sure their views are politically acceptable.
Free speech is over. If dissent isn't being actively punished - the current push for deanonymisation is coincidental, no doubt - at the very least it's heavily throttled algorithmically.
This topic has been discussed on Chinese forums and social media for like 1 million times. The short answer is it did. To give you a prefect example - the J-10 fighter jet was first tested in 1998, it shot down multiple best EU made fighter jets last year.
TLDR timeline
50s-70s was soviet engineers / knowledge transfer from post war wreckage. Built basic industry, 80s-10s was relentlessly building out every industrial chain for every sector except leading edge because lack talent. Talent pipeline was 90s-00s building out academic system, 2010s-20s was brrrting tertiary talent. Couldn't brrrt tertiary talent without teaching peasants literacy in 60s, and then having literate parents in 80s family planning (i.e. one child policy) which filtered generations of 1-2 kid households where surplus went towards education/tertiary. All the recent highend progress recently was result from that, step by step building on generational phase/timescale. PRC only passed US in total STEM a few years ago, now they on trend to talent inflection point 2x-3x STEM vs US in next 20 years. People mock one child policy, but it was exactly choreographed for this outcome, one of few cases of generational peasant to phd planning, though 50 year foresight to build up greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, not 100 year foresight because cost is shit TFR in the next 50 years.
China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.
We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.
A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.
in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...
AI halucination is well known, and output is non-repeatable.
There is also no indication of what timeframe, what industry, how it is calculated and more.
AI responses are starting points, and should never be considered factual without verification.
If you want to have any trust in youe numbers, find real stats, from a reliable source.
Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.
aye. the old elite of China were overthrown by the communists, whose (that is, Mao's) decisions starved most of the country, followed by the insanity of the cultural revolution.
the new technocratic leadership is just that -- new. really only started happening in the 1980s and 90s.
the US is falling apart due to the entrenched hyperwealthy seeing more and more rents. China's hyperwealthy are all new money and are not entrenched yet, not the way groups like Ford or Boeing or Goldman Sachs are. But soon they will be, and soon the CCP will start prioritizing their needs
Actually, this is very hard because different individuals want different things. Normally you need a mechanism like the market or democracy to aggregate individual preferences. Expecting a dictatorship to do this well seems optimistic, and the full history of communist China doesn’t support the idea.
If you were to control for other variables I doubt there’d be much correlation. After filtering out engineers who belong to other categories with stronger associations to authoritarianism, you’re more likely to be left with the hyper-individual-freedom types than the hyper-authoritarian types.
It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
Too often libertarian means liberty for me and not for you. That's authoritarian.
And this flows in other areas. If I need a functional vehicle with cheap upkeep I optimize for it. I invest in low risk products since the income is limited. I know that people with plan and confidence are scary, you don’t meet them every day.
> According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution. It was a finding the authors reached with caution and even a certain resistance. “We are social scientists,” Hertog explains in an interview, “so we are always seeking socio-economic explanations. We accepted this idea that there might be personality traits, expressed first in choice of profession and then in political ideology, very reluctantly.”
* https://macleans.ca/news/world/why-do-so-many-jihadis-have-e...
> This article demonstrates that individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent among violent Islamists worldwide than other degree holders. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.
* https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/29836/1/Why_are_t...
They just no longer do any central planning on nonsense matters like how much ice cream need to be produced for the summer and how much coffee shops are required for Shanghai.
I would say that for long-term engineering projects (building bridges etc) authoritarian central planning is a required trait.
I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism and lived abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.
Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Mining_engineer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/forget-the...
I can't speak for china either, so I looked it up and indeed, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao worked as a hydraulic engineer before becoming a politician.
Well in germany we had Merkel as a doctorate in quantum chemistry (but she never worked as an engineer, but neither did Xi Jinping).
I certainly would prefer politicians with some engineering background, unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine.
A lot of current/recent crisis and utter dependence on russian gas and oil was her doing. She desperately tried to appease putin at all costs despite him mocking her from time to time, she pushed long term underfunding of German army despite war on Ukraine happening since 2014, closed down nuclear plants too fast so coal energy was needed immediately and so on.
Shame on her to be polite, not a good example if you want to show that engineering background (just studies in her case) can lead to better outcomes than lawyers.
She was a software engineer. LOL.
(I speak as someone with a degree in Computer Science and Software “Engineering”, and an inglorious past as a Chemical Engineering student)
Well, um, that's China in a nutshell. They did exactly that.
Turns out people with power like to amass and maintain power, regardless of the structure they gain it in.
Dan came off as very China biased and Tyler literally schooled him on a few occasions.
But despite that, there are grains of truth in what he said, we have lawyers turned politicians at the helm in the US, so we have a great democratic system but on the flip side hardly any engineers leading us to the predicament we are in now, where nothing ever gets built.
It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.
Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
The result is that far more people get far worse deals far more of the time. Healthcare, the jobs market, education, climate damage, grift in high places - it's all the same issue, and a lot of the problems are rooted in denial of reality on spurious "economic" grounds.
Isn't that a trait of the left in general?
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.
Think of it as engineers vs non-engineers (lawyers/mba types/etc). We complain about that on here all the time (ex. boeing). It's where the priorities are: is it on making things better or making more money? In an ideal world, it would be both. Unfortunately here, it is not otherwise enshittification would not be a thing.
And if you look at the absolute contribution in dollars, manufacturing has gone up 1.76 times between 2005 and today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANNQGSP
This is roughly 2.9% a year over 20 years, so slightly ahead of inflation over the period.
To me this points to a story where manufacturing grew slightly but the other parts of the economy grew a lot more. Not exactly a bear case on manufacturing, but not a tremendously exciting one either.
The main reason it’s so political is the drop in number of jobs has been huge, and too fast for many to adjust. Automation has come fast.
“ Manufacturing employment declined from 17.3 million in January 2000 to a low of 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 33% over the decade. Compared to the peak of 19.5 million in 1979, manufacturing employment had declined approximately 41% by 2009.”
https://blog.uwsp.edu/cps/2025/01/29/u-s-manufacturing-emplo...
Interesting to think about. Share of GDP staying stable but number of jobs fell by around half.
Of course there are areas where that labour would be useful: healthcase, teaching, childcare, elderly care all come to mind (and there are many other examples). But our economy is not set up to enable this. The problem isn't supply side (difficulty retraining people to do the jobs), it's demand side: the people who need these services often don't have the money to pay for them. So the jobs are badly paid.
And it's a downward spiral: as wealth becomes more concentrated, demand for labour drops because those controlling the wealth already have their needs met and often don't care about the needs of others.
If history is anyhing to go by, then this will eventually lead to war and/or revolution.
On the last sentence, one significant difference between then and now will be the possibility of automated soldiers, which is terrifying to think about.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/u.s.-navy-shipbuilding-consistently...
If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.
So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over.
Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(
>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete
Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.
You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.
Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\
Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.
Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.
I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.
The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.
The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.
But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.
Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.
Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.
[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.
Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.
Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.
One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.
Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.
Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.
China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
I went to the window factory, which was directly beside more window factories, and directly beside that was the place that extruded aluminum for use. The aluminum they used was produced a up the road in what they called the metal district.
You are even saying that "industrial clusters in China" so there is clearly some amount of planning involved. There is obviously benefits to having all of the aluminum factories beside a aluminum producer, and having the shipping/packaging warehouses by the docks, etc.
There is some amount of government work at play here, either on a small scale or a larger scale to provide a reason for places to all setup.
I've also seen things that just are not possible in North America. Asked for samples of aluminum extrusions and had the die made and extrusion done in a day. Locally it would take months before a sample is at my door.
I've sent designs for quotes and get quotes in hours, half the time factory in NA doesn't even reply. And even when it does it's more of a "go away" then anything else.
I've seen live video of robotic factories building entire cabinets for housing.
There is some amount of rose coloured glasses in this thread. But we cannot deny that China wants business and can get stuff done fast and efficiently. That cannot be said for modern day factories in US or Canada. The work ethic and desire for business are just completely different.
You have areas with lots of Oil Refineries, Houston and Baton Rouge for example. You have areas with lots of steel mills, like in North West Indiana. These are examples I personally know of. Obviously a lot of big tech factories exist close to each other in Silicon Valley and in Austin Texas too.
There are "industrial clusters" in America too, simply put. It is natural for large chemical plants or industrial sites to build up near where their source is. Hence all the oil refineries around the gulf. This is not a uniquely China thing at all. Lots of major US cities are known for specific types of industries.
... like Factorio, just in real life.
> The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation.
A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance?
> How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?
There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment.
Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.
Famously, Houston has no zoning.
Or, as they say everything is bigger in Texas, why not think big... an oil refinery!
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...
There was a great article from like 20 years ago - it quoted Jobs too on that. I remember Forbes or something like that, maybe this "“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” — The New York Times (Jan 21, 2012)" (cant open it now)
The link to avoid everybody to do the same query: https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2
I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await.
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?