[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.