[pear01]

That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

[adamweld]

I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.

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.

[lukan]

"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 lawyer"

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.

[AdamN]

Yeah I'm pretty nervous about engineers in charge. Merkel is interesting because her dad was reverend in the East. My reading of her is more that she was smart and there were good options in physics/chemistry - but then she effectively went right into politics directly afterwards. For better or for worse she never had that 5-10 years of day-to-day work before politics.

[kakacik]

She is the most hated EU politician in whole eastern part of EU, a symbol of EU failings and main reason there are many EU-sceptics across whole region.

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.

[lukan]

The german army was never underfunded. It just enjoyed lots of luxories, like lots of management staff instead of combat troops and custom made special equipment (that often failed to deliver) instead of buying what the market offered.

[dralley]

Then let's call it severely financially mismanaged.

[blipvert]

Here in the UK the leader of the opposition frequently refers to herself as an engineer.

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)

[sampo]

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has both an engineering degree (computer systems engineering) and a law degree. Best of both worlds?

[blipvert]

Touché!

[NickC25]

>.... unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine

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.

[sharadov]

This podcast between Tyler and Dan was a great listen - https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/dan-wang/

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.

[Gravityloss]

Bill Allen certainly got a lot of things manufactured at Boeing, despite being a lawyer

[pear01]

And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it.

Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.

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.

[yareally]

Coincidentally, FDR's predecesor was an engineer and we know how that presidency went (not that it was entirely his fault, but he didn't make things better either)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#Mining_engineer

[FeloniousHam]

I enjoyed Megan Mcardle's take on Hoover:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/forget-the...

[shimman]

These people are just trying to find an alternative narrative because the vast majority of the population have been rejecting neoliberalism for a good 30 years now. So they spin up the foreign enemy is better than us, so we need to deregulate more and not hold monopolies accountable.

If we broke up Google or Amazon, suddenly we're just as bad as China!

[HeWhoLurksLate]

why can't we go "wow they're getting really good, maybe we should invest harder in education and research?" That makes wayyy more sense to me

[jacquesm]

Because it would first require one to acknowledge that they are no longer ahead. In some cultures this sort of thing is extremely difficult.

[harrall]

In humans*

[maxweylandt]

Comedian Ronny Chieng has a bit about this: (sorry for short) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1cmCueTZz1A

[_DeadFred_]

In the west greater education doesn't lead to people wanting to live in a factory compound in communal dorms with suicide nets where they can be woken up at midnight to start a shift on a whim. Doesn't lead to people wanting to eat all their meals in a cafeteria with the other people on their shift. The factories I visited even their children went to school in a school within the compound.

[swsieber]

It rings true though.

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.

[Gud]

The USA still has a lot of high end manufacturing going on. There is no “used to”.

[embedding-shape]

Sure, but it's seemingly doing less and less. "Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP" has been going downwards for a long long time, here is the last twenty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA

[moregrist]

I don’t think you can take “percentage of GDP” as an indication that the US is doing less. It could be doing the same amount while the GDP grew tremendously in other areas, for example software.

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.

[ua709]

When politicians talk about the decline in manufacturing what they mean is jobs. I work in American manufacturing and there are tons of amazing projects happening but the decline in jobs is real. Especially low skilled jobs, This trend will only continue and I doubt any politician, regardless of thier background, can change that. And I’m not sure it’s a bad thing as it means manufacturing productivity is increasing

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.

[nicoburns]

There's a long-term economic problem looming around the loss of jobs: which is that most people's ability to command a share of our economic output (i.e. earn money) is tied to their value as a labourer. If that labour is no longer needed by those who control capital and thus allocation of labour resources (which is increasingly the case across many segments of our economy), then we end up with an economy where people increasingly struggle to earn a decent living.

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.

[ua709]

I've been thinking about this and I definitely agree.

On the last sentence, one significant difference between then and now will be the possibility of automated soldiers, which is terrifying to think about.

[Gud]

I concur with moregrist

[embedding-shape]

I'm very glad that you confirmed that with a comment, I was a bit confused what specifically you thought.

[Gud]

You’re welcome

[bad_haircut72]

At the end of the day the reason people see manufacturing as special is because in a war it is a strategic resource. If this wasnt the case nobody would care about "manufacturing jobs" any more than the general economy. So if you use defence production as your metric... "U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Is Consistently Over Budget and Delayed Despite Billions Invested in Industry"

https://www.gao.gov/blog/u.s.-navy-shipbuilding-consistently...

[Haven880]

You probably havnt been to Shenzhen yet. Try visit there once. You will change the text you typed here.

[callmeal]

> Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

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.

[laffOr]

It feels like people accept this criticism when it props up their position - for an American (software) engineer, companies run by _American engineers_ vs companies run by American non-engineers is an obvious case of engineering is better (see criticism of Boeing); but when it's Chinese engineer vs American non-engineer, the "American" bit is more important.

[kevinqi]

just one q: have you been to china before?

[cucumber3732842]

It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.

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.

[IshKebab]

It's one of those just-so stories that sounds like a nice neat explanation. You can't put the complex reality into a neat single sentence so nonsense like this is always going to win.

[anon7725]

> America used to build things too

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?

[pear01]

What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.

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.

[decimalenough]

It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.

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.

[chii]

> society can be engineered

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.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's better than a culture that sees every transaction solely in terms of corporate profit and doesn't consider the existence of trade offs at all.

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.

[DeathArrow]

>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.

Isn't that a trait of the left in general?

[KaiserPro]

Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.

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.

[almosthere]

Just about everything on NPR is I want this to be true, not this is true.

[jama211]

So you’re only attacking the title they need to use to survive on the modern internet, rather than the nuanced points they actually make?

If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.