Breakneck

 Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future -- Dan Wang

I listened to this book in the car. It should be considered as a companion piece to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, or maybe I've got that backwards. Wang, formerly a China-based analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, is now a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. Succinctly put, Wang convincingly argues that China's culture has been defined and dominated for the last few decades by engineers who got things done, whereas America has been ruled by lawyers and proceduralism aimed at stopping things from getting done. As a result China has the world's dominant material culture but poor enjoyment by its citizens, whereas America is hamstrung by its inability to get out of its own way as lawyers tie things up, but a strong ability to self-heal.

Amongst the curious features of the book is Wang's generatively positive vision of Robert Moses, who seems to be the kind of guy he'd like to see more of. Ever since Caro's 1974 The Power Broker but also the work of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, Moses has been a bete noire for Americans, the guy who would have built expressways above 14th and 42nd St and who otherwise made Manhattan (and other cities) safe for suburbia and cars while normalizing the flattening of slums and the destruction of working class communities and slowing the development of mass transit. It's a pretty bold move but worth pondering. 

Because I listened to it in the car and the listening straddled one if not two vacations, my uptake of the book is a bit fragmented. Also because Wang and his publisher couldn't be bothered to read it himself and hired a voice actor, which always distances the performance from the text.

Interestingly a quick search on Wang reveals a recent interview in which he argues that people should write less often and, presumably, in a more considered and thoughful way. I should probably listen to that, as I fall directly into the prime suspect pile on this one.