[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.