Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pear01 119 days ago
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.
1 comments
decimalenough 119 days ago
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.

link
chii 119 days ago
> 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.

link
TheOtherHobbes 118 days ago
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.

link
DeathArrow 118 days ago
>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?

link