China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers | Hacker News Reader

China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers

freakonomics.com

164 pointsm-hodges289 comments

我是一个一直居住在中国的中国人，今年快40岁了。个人观点，我觉得这篇文章的最核心的观点已经错了，中国自古以来没有由工程师管理过，一直是官员，在古代是读书人，是士，工匠是贱籍。即使现代，工厂里是官员说了算还是工程师说了算？如果是后者，就没有那么多国企倒闭，没有下岗潮了。你可以去街头随便调查100个人，你问问他们觉得国家是谁在管理？

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I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.

There are people who think that China is about to replace America as world's obviously dominant superpower, and there are people who think that China is about to collapse, nothing in-between.

China;s history has been one of repeated 300-year to 500-year cycles. But this time is looking more like slow decay everywhere, true.

Collapse? People need to know and understand Adam Smith's remark that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

I think it will probably do neither, though as an American we're making a good faith effort to ensure the first.

As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.

Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.

> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.

Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.

Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.

> "Iron rice bowl" (simplified Chinese: 铁饭碗; traditional Chinese: 鐵飯碗; pinyin: tiě fàn wǎn) is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security,[1] similar to life tenure. Traditionally, people considered to have such positions include military personnel, members of the civil service, as well as employees of various state-owned enterprises (through the mechanism of the work unit).

For my fellow westerners.

But there is a difference between officials/managers and lawyers (?)

I wish people who write such stuff would first work in a political system and understand what politicians actually do, and the constraints of their political systems they work in. No, America's problem isn't because of lawyers in power or lack of engineers in power. It's simply about the political system - the US is a federal democracy and the Chinese an authoritarian one-party State. An authoritarian state that isn't answerable to the people can do a lot of things that a democratic one simply cannot (at the same pace) because a democratic country first has to reach a consensus with all the stake holders involved.

Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.

This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.

Nothing you just said is really about the political system, though. America has plenty of politicians willing to cross the red tape, but they only do it for personal gain.

The economy is always what it boils down to. Americans see factory work as hazard duty, and you can't exactly take untrained vagrants and put them on the construction site. If you want Americans to build you things, you have to pay them an American wage. Otherwise the market economy doesn't work. China isn't burdened by any of this, not because they're authoritarian but because their economy is planned. If they want to make cars domestically, it doesn't matter what Mexico charges for labor - whatever the state says, goes.

I don’t think either Trump or Modi is known for waiting to reach a consensus with all the stakeholders involved.

And people complain about both being a danger to democracy.

It is wrong that autocracies don't have the same problems, perhaps or probably even more significant. The premises are wrong. If we think all politics stream down from Xi, you would be mistaken. The largest threat to him are his own party members and that is true in every autocracy.

So instead of making some grand technocratic beneficial decisions, the decisions are mostly oriented towards keeping you in power. A power that is very fragile. At times that still might net sensible policies, but the same is true for democracies who have to deal with public opinion. Democracies have the benefit that even a mob (the public) has some capabilities for learning.

The solutions to domestic manufacturing would be solved completely differently in both countries because the problems are different. A large factor is simply labor costs for developed nations for example.

I don't think there is a solution aside from import/export taxes. If that is true, is Trump secretly a good president? Perhaps not, but you would need to come up with solutions yourself. A democracy where a public just demands solutions is ineffective, but so are most if not all more autocratically governed nations.

A lot of people here focus on the political side of this topic, so I want to share an engineering perspective instead. At the core, solving any problem really follows the same pattern: first you figure out what the problem is, then you set up a way to measure it, come up with a possible solution, and test it against your measurement. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t, try something else. The key is just running this loop quickly enough. This process applies no matter what kind of problem you’re tackling—engineering, politics, or social issues.

The U.S. has this loop at the company level. China has this loop at the local government level.

In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.

If the U.S. really wants to build this kind of feedback loop at the government level, voters need to judge election candidates based on their track record, not just campaign rhetoric. And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.

I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

For example, GDP used to be the main measure of success. That pushed local governments to chase higher GDP numbers at all costs—regardless of whether the projects were actually practical or useful. This led to overbuilding, unnecessary construction, and even ghost towns.

> I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Chinese "democracy" is not one from our viewpoint, but from their, an oligarchy this large (10% of the population vote) is the perfect balance between democracy and their old imperial system.

When they coined "Communism with Chinese characteristics", in the west most people focused on "Communism", on all side of the political spectrum, but what's really important was "with Chinese characteristics".

Having lived in China, the whole control part that's part of Communism (and Chinese dynasties) drove me nuts. The market economy part, though, that was great. In the late Hu years China seemed like a place where you could get anything you wanted (special order? no problem), and every Chinese person seemed optimistic. I gather that feeling has changed (by increased government control, it seems), which is sad, because it was a great time.

I share the article's interviewee's opinion that Americans and Chinese are similar, I came to the same conclusion. I think China has so much to offer the world, and Americans could easily think of it sort of how we see the UK. The reactions I get from Americans when I mention I lived in China makes me think that Americans want to love China. Kind of the way that the "otherness" between men and women acts to attract. (And also to make relating difficult.) Unfortunately, the Communist engineering the human soul is completely at odds both with flourishing humanity and American's rampantly individualistic culture.

> And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.

I think we have this already. Sure, if you go looking for it you can find any brand of stupidity you want—and if you want to sell a narrative when you find it you put a camera in front of them. But on the whole we have this. The problem is that the two dominant political parties have fundamentally incompatible visions for the country's future. And, at the national level, that's what we end up voting for. One of these visions has to win and both candidates need to share it before voters can evaluate the individuals. Even in primaries the metric for success isn't the best candidate but who has the best chance of winning in the general.

Pulling back the curtain winning the vision for the new US Right is likely to be a long drawn out fight because for many issues the opposition is a kind of person, e.g. the gays, women, who won't ever "move on" or accept defeat and so will require ongoing active suppression. It's why I'm sad to see Moderate Republicans pushed into obscurity because it seemed for a while there they were within spitting distance of a unified vision.

> In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.

China is very decentralized though, Beijing has the ultimate say but their attention span limited. So they maybe set targets, or step in when a huge scandal happens, but most localities are fairly far away from Beijing’s attention. While China doesn’t have America’s federalism, it basically has it by default to deal with its huge size. Every city has different rules, taxes, they have their own local champions, imagine if every big city in the USA had their own auto producer, for example. Hukou means china’s illegal immigration is mostly internal. If you become homeless in Beijing or Shanghai, they will just deport you to whatever village your hukou is in (well, free train/bus ticket at least, but you probably came to the big city because you couldn’t make it in your village in the first place).

>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.

Lawyers and accountants. Just look at the way that once great engineering companies like Boeing and Intel have been run into the ground by bean counters ('financialization').

I generally just have this growing opinion that capitalism is fundamentally about lawyers and accountants. Capital is ultimately nothing more than paper or numbers and worthless in the real world without lawyers and accountants.

It's neither the accountants nor the lawyers, in my opinion. In my experience, both accountants and lawyers tend to be non-prescriptive - they tell you how things are, options, and likely outcomes.

The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.

Aka mba

Having an MBA for strategic business decisions probably is more relevant than having an engineer aside from some highly technical niche sector. You need an open culture to discuss strategy and involve different perspectives (No, it doesn't matter if your MBA of choice is black or not).

Most MBAs know too that wanking to quarterlies doesn't make a good long term strategy. Most companies just forget to do any long term strategy as long as such basic controlling data points look decent.

Unless you have built hundreds of tools you are not an experience engenieer.

Most MBA don't know shit because they have not built hundreds of companies.

Muilenberg had an engineering background.

Having Engineering background does not mean you can be captured by financial forces.

Having a world view where you identify engineering with good, and finance with bad - to the extent that if someone is bad you reclassify them under finance, is also not healthy.

Makes sense though. Capitalism demands ever growing profits, and there is more money to be made in wealth accumulation and investments than in building things.

Boeing moved their headquarters to D.C. Their management doesn't care about the product, managing design, manufacturing, that is a side detail that someone else takes care of. Management cares about something else detached from the rest of the company.

I listened to this podcast earlier this week, and yesterday listened to another in the series exploring the difference between corruption in the US and China.

It's always good to learn how other cultures govern themselves. China learned a lot from the US and other countries, adapted, and then benefitted immensely. In the US, we can learn a lot too.

> In the US, we can learn a lot too.

Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.

I think its less a problem of lawyers and more a problem of age.

I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.

If you've worked retail you know many above 75 are not all there, plain and simple.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...

60 should be HARD limit for any politician (including scotus)

Why would there need to be a hard limit on something the electorate is already directly voting on? You might say every election is an election on if people above X age should be in congress.

Which really makes you wonder how well the system is really working. Of course I don’t know this but I feel like if you asked everyone, the majority of people would say that 95, or 90, or 85 is too old to be in congress. But somehow they keep getting reelected…

Incumbents have an enormous advantage. We would need publicly funded elections in order to change this.

Almost like people vote in people of similar age. Baby boomers was the largest generation far larger than the preceding and later generation.

Because people vote for the party and not the individual in most cases.

Direct voting is relative. Candidates are supported in the last 15 years also by companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC and coupled with campaigns getting more and more expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United... that can mean that in practice it is not as direct as it might seem.

Not sure what is the solution, but if people say they would prefer younger "options" and they don't materialize on the ballots, that is a sign that the system does not work as intended.

Aging population means that many democracies will have more old than young voters. Couple that with the American culture of f you I’ve got mine, leads to a prioritization not on the future generations.

why is my daughter (she is 12) not eligible to be a candidate in 2028? she has great ideas and is awesome all around

Benjamin Franklin would like a word with you (signed your declaration of independence at 70), as would Churchill, Picasso, Enzo Ferrari, Mother Theresa and a thousand others…

Mother Theresa? Pretty sure she was young when she did most of her stuff and just aged out. Clerics don’t exactly retire …

Had to double check the dates on Churchill - very impressive

From a quick look at her bio:

- started her first charity/hospice in India at 40 years old

- real expansion of her work started after 60 years old

- received a Nobel Prize at 69

- brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine at 72

- continued working until death at 87

Churchill probably not the best example:

"In 1953, during his second stint as prime minister, Winston Churchill had a stroke after dinner. “No one seemed alarmed by [his] slurred speech and unsteadiness on his feet, one of the advantages of having a reputation for enjoying alcohol,” writes Andrew Roberts, a historian. For several weeks, as Churchill was incapable of governing, his son-in-law and private secretary in effect ran the country. He never fully recovered, yet refused to stand down until 1955, when he was 80. " https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/07/03/senility-in-hi...

Yes, Churchill's second term as prime minister is not a good example.

Picasso's output in his last 20 years is not considered in the same way as his previous work.

Churchill at all ages is exactly what the US should be trying to avoid - he was the best product of a generation of politicians who took the greatest empire in the history of the world and flubbed the economics and diplomacy so badly that it has become a footnote.

If the plan is to reduce the reach of Washington to Virginia and DC then Churchill would be a great choice of leader and if that is the explicit goal then ok sure. If the plan is to maintain a peaceful status quo as a powerful and successful country people like Churchill in the leadership are a very bad sign indeed.

You have to assume the UK had no power to influence its internal or world affairs to conclude that its political class were competent through the last century. Which is a crazy stance given where they were in the early 1900s.

Not to be an anglophile but you are seriously giving that generation of british rulers a lack of credit. They stood up for the international order and joined two wars that destroyed them financially. Britain could have sat both of those world wars out. They could have said its not a big deal that germany invsde belgium or poland. But they willingly and knowingly undertook an expensive endeavor for a greater good.

When their empire was then faltering aftet world war ii, they then let them go. They set them up to be independent and had peaceful transfers of power instead of bloody civil wars like France and Portugal did. They didnt do it perfect. But they gave them independence, in democracies, with books of laws, and set them up in international organizations.

Britain took the losing hand and tried to set up a situation that a rules based world order could thrive in, and churchill was amongst the men in charge for that.

Gp was probably talking about Churchill last stint, after 70, where he was extraordinarily bad for his country. I know leftists usually blame Thatcher, but to me she mostly tried to make up for what the post-WW2 UK government broke. At least unlike France, they managed the decolonization peacefully.

> But they willingly and knowingly undertook an expensive endeavor for a greater good.

Let's not go that far. They joined the war because of literal decades of politicking done beforehand in order to secure an alliance with France and Russia. Germany wanted more prestige, more colonies and a Navy. Britain, being the preeminent colonial and naval power, would prefer that didn't happen.

Your view on if the allies were justified in wanting to contain the ambitions of Germany probably depends on if you see Germany as justified in wanting a bigger slice of the pie that the other powers of the time were currently taking up, or if you see Germany as a buffoon that upset the existing balance of power for selfish reasons. But Britain entering into those alliances made conflict inevitable, and I find it hard to see any selflessness in desiring or preserving empire. They all paid dearly in the end.

WWI I think there are no heroes or villains. But WWII is a much different story.

Churchill post-WW2, Picasso after 60, Ferrari after 58 (his son died and that's a _really_ good excuse tbh, he might have stayed sharp if not for that) are good example for people who think humans after 60 mentally decline.

it is not just the mental decline - this is great read on the subject: https://archive.is/2025.07.23-164742/https://www.ft.com/cont...

anyone over 60 can paint, write, drive cars and make the world a better place, just not run the country

One thing I've realized it that the Democratic party is a machine. It rewards loyalty and waiting your turn. It punishes getting out of line and challenging incumbents.

Parts of the Republican party are too of course (hence Grassley) but it's been the target of several successful insurgencies. First the tea party and then Trump. Now it's turning into something completely different.. a cult of personalty for a dictator.

But the intact machine is the reason why the Democrats can not rise to the occasion. Their whole system is one designed to produce dour grey apparatchiks.

DP is corporate funded and exists to squash movements from the left. Most people have to see this up close to see it though.

I remember in the 1970s when the Soviet Union was called a gerontocracy. Gorbachev becoming general Secretary at the age of 54 was seen as a breath of fresh air. As your chart shows, one third of the US Senate is over the age of 70. We have people like Biden and Trump as president. Sign of the times (who are respectively 10 and 7 years older than Xi). Incidentally, Xi is the oldest member of the Politburo Standing Committee.

Only one third? I'm highly surprised that it's that low.

...anyone above 75 is not all there, plain and simple.

Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.

But yeah, Grassley needs to hang up the spurs.

It's not ageism, people deciding the future of your country shouldn't already have a foot in the grave

Just look at Trump and Biden speeches VS Bush or Obama

That’s like literally saying someone going off on someone because of their skin color (exclusively) isn’t being racist.

It’s in the definition. Words have meaning.

The difference for purposes of the conversation happening here is skin color absolutely does not affect cognition where age definitely does.

Plenty of 12 year old morons, and 90 year old razor sharp professors, as counter examples.

Either way, those same old folks are the ones who’d need to sign off on the rules banning their existence and I don’t see them doing that.

So who are the idiots exactly?

Personally, I think it’s the folks who think more rules will make a difference against someone who is explicitly great at violating rules and getting away with it. While pretending to be a moron.

Ah alright, let's not do anything about anything ever then. Criminals still do crimes, so obviously laws are useless am I right ?

My point is actually enforce the god damn rules instead of making more bullshit rules that only get enforced against people without power.

Mother Nature has made this particular rule, and you can only fool her for so long. 80+ year old people do not belong in positions of power, any more than 8-year-olds do. They should step aside and let the next generation take responsibility for their own future.

(Or rather make them take responsibility, in the case of voters who insist on electing Trumps, Reagans, Bidens, and Feinsteins simply because those are the candidates they've heard about, due to their having been around the longest.)

As I said in another comment - good luck!

If no one can unseat the king, they’re still the king.

And after all, if they really are as dumb and incompetent as you say that should be easy eh?

If no one can unseat the king, they’re still the king.

Well, in theory, we weren't supposed to have kings here, but it appears that the voters are going to insist on one.

And after all, if they really are as dumb and incompetent as you say that should be easy eh?

That's my usual response to Trumpers complaining about Democrats in my own state's legislature. I have to say, though, that it doesn't work any better for me than it will for you.

Trump is about the same age as Bush and Clinton, oddly enough, but they were presidents in very different times.

It has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with corruption, greed, and hate. And that is what a lot of people keep voting for.

"Muh ageism" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for these kinds of conversations. You have to make an effort to actually argue against the statements you disagree with. Are people 75-and-older agile and flexible enough, mentally, to perform in these positions? To connect with the constituents they represent? If the incidence of the requisite acuity does indeed drop with advanced age, are the individuals in government disproportionately among those who avoid issues? And, if so, how do you know?

>Are people 75-and-older agile and flexible enough, mentally, to perform in these positions?

All of them? No. But I also could introduce you to plenty of 25 year old's that aren't "agile and flexible enough, mentally to perform these positions". And it's often not even "mental agility" that is the problem with people in power, it's corruption, greed, and just plain old hate that is the problem. Those things don't have any age limits except maybe below 6 years old, and even then I've met some pretty nasty, spoiled toddlers.

>But I also could introduce you to plenty of 25 year old's that aren't "agile and flexible enough, mentally to perform these positions"

There are vanishingly-few 25-year-olds in national office, certainly not in proportion to their chunk of the overall population. But bringing them up at all is beside the point. The contention at hand is that there are too many elderly people, who are beyond their ability to perform adequately, in positions of power. If you would like to address that, feel free. But please stay on topic.

>There are vanishingly-few 25-year-olds in national office

Well thank [deity] for that, because many of them aren't fit for it. Neither are 75 year olds, but age doesn't really play that much of a factor - it's the people voting to put shitheads in positions of power no matter their age that are causing this damage in the first place.

>> "Muh ageism" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for these kinds of conversations.

>There are vanishingly-few 25-year-olds in national office, certainly not in proportion to their chunk of the overall population. But bringing them up at all is beside the point.

Yes, it is the point - you made it the point with your "muh ageism" quip. I simply pointed out that age doesn't make a difference, but greed, corruption, and hate do.

>The contention at hand is that there are too many elderly people, who are beyond their ability to perform adequately, in positions of power.

There are also old people in power that are not "beyond their ability to perform adequately", and that's also a very subjective goalpost you're setting. Some of those shitty old politicians are doing exactly what their shitty constituents want them to, even if they are just holding the pen while someone younger moves their hand.

>But please stay on topic.

You made this about "muh ageism" not me, so all ages are fair to comment about. Shitty 25 year olds are actually worse than shitty 75 year olds, because shitty 25 year olds will be around much longer doing much more harm than a shitty 75 year old politician could. And again, it has nothing to do with age, and everything to do about corruption, greed, and hate. Those things are ageless.

Ok so then you compare the numbers and you see that one group is worse than the other. Just because you found one black pixel in a grey area doesn't mean its not white.

Totally fair to call out blanket “anyone 75+ isn’t all there” as ageist. But the governance point still stands: even sharp octogenarians are often out of sync with modern life (platforms, tech norms, digital risks). Only 8% of adults 65+ say they’re online “almost constantly,” vs 48% of 18–29 a proxy for how different the information environment is that shapes decisions.

The word would be a better place if everyone was offline more often. They wouldn't be as subject to the propaganda oligopolies.

>Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.

we take it for granted that someone below the age of 15-ish in the United States shouldn't be behind the wheel of an automobile, but that's not universally true. We try 18 year olds as adults, and that's not universally true, either.

It isn't a far leap to presume that people past a certain age meets the same psychological and mental/cognitive decline as the average person that age without testing.

You wouldn't expect a 95 year old to be eagle-eyed and athletic, to presume that their age isn't a deficit whatsoever is ageist from another perspective.

If I saw a person using a wheelchair I wouldn't wait for them to tell me that they needed a ramp for the staircase at the restaurant -- this too is -ist, but I see no real problem with it as a wheelchair user myself.

Somewhat similarly : the amount of 'with-it' and sober 95 year olds that I have met in real life makes me really question their fitness as an important member of a government group. Just like the presidency, these roles should probably be qualified into by participants with more than just votes.

If you're a 95 year old that passes the mental health and physical health examinations, more power to you , welcome to <government group>.

If you're too old to staff an airport control tower, you're too old for Congress and especially the Oval Office.

Not just because your faculties aren't what they once were, but because you have no stake in the outcome of your decisionmaking.

How can you expect them to legislate for the nation when they know they won’t be around when the policies come to fruition?

There is another sort of old age the US suffers from. The government is now amongst the oldest nation-state organizations on the planet with probably the oldest written national laws (the constitution) still in use.

The cruft that has built up (from the 2nd amendment, to the electoral college) over 250ish years is a serious problem.

> with probably the oldest written national laws (the constitution) still in use.

The UK would easily disagree, with their founding codification in 1215.

The Magna Carta was a list of stipulations relating to a monarch as the absolute head of state. The UK does not have that anymore.

The Magna Carta was a second, more forceful, iteration of the Charter of Liberties introduced a century earlier in 1100 by Henry I of England.

Clauses of both are still part of the basis of English Common Law (the Common Law cited in the US Constitution) and the Magna Carta is still being cited in recent times by politicians and lawyers in support of (UK) constitutional positions, and still, albeit rarely, cited in UK courts

   in 2012 the Occupy London protestors attempted to use Magna Carta in resisting their eviction from St. Paul's Churchyard by the City of London. In his judgment the Master of the Rolls gave this short shrift, noting somewhat drily that although clause 29 was considered by many the foundation of the rule of law in England, he did not consider it directly relevant to the case, and that the two other surviving clauses ironically concerned the rights of the Church and the City of London and could not help the defendants.

It's firmly a part of the continuously evolving history of UK law:

  Magna Carta carries little legal weight in modern Britain, as most of its clauses have been repealed and relevant rights ensured by other statutes, but the historian James Holt remarks that the survival of the 1215 charter in national life is a "reflexion of the continuous development of English law and administration"

suggesting that what the UK lacks is the stagnation of US law which hasn't yet evolved past the errors of scale that have crept in since its foundation; the US electoral could also do with a revamp to better serve the people.

* two quotes above sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

The UK doesn't have an entrenched constitution through. Whenever there's a simple parliamentary majority for a reform in the lower house it can be done. In the US even simple laws can require a filibuster breaking supermajority in the upper change, and changing the constitution is much harder.

The Charter of Liberties is still regularly referenced in UK law. Just because the system is Common Law, does not mean it is not entrenched.

I'd suggest the US' adoption of a 2-party system likely leads to far more of that stagnation.

But that's more because they want to keep the charter, no? I mean that keeping the UK constitution "living" is much easier since the written parts can be legally changed easily. And the 2 party system is a result of US electoral and constitutional law, which is entrenched. If the US had a new constitution from scratch today I don't think it would feature the electoral college, it's there because of legal inertia.

So... The charter is an older law, than the USA's existence, right?

Yes, but I'm not arguing the US Constitution is older than the UK one, although it is much older than that of almost all countries I think. I'm arguing that the UK doesn't suffer from having an old constitution because its constitution changes more easily than the US one.

Ok... But that's not what _I_ addressed in my comment. The US doesn't operate with the oldest laws on the books.

Then I guess we were arguing past each other.

I doubt that’s the problem. The public policy government is captured by corporations. The military policy arm of the government is manipulated by a myriad of interests operating indirectly from the shadows — ranging from foreign intelligence agencies (ie Israeli) to military/industrial companies.

Old so competent senators barely matter. It’s all about unelected corporate boards and secret groups within influential government agencies.

It's kind of the same thing. Corruption has shaped around the old laws and the power structures that aligned around them.

> I doubt that’s the problem.

I don't know, it seems like it's a weird argument but it's definitely a thought I've had too. When I was eyeballing the Egyptian dynasties I was bit shocked to notice how short lived they all are, compared to what I expected. The majority struggle to get to 150 years, no one gets past 300. In fact old man America will soon be an older polity than all of them except the much maligned Ptolemies (275 years). Same deal for the (well documented) Chinese dynasties. People think kingdoms and states are long enduring, measured in multiple centuries, but they're actually pretty unstable.

It seems like a weird unexamined law of the universe. Dynasties/polities struggle to make it past 300~ without some major interruption or something going wrong, if they haven't imploded earlier. There are exceptions. The Korean Joseon managed an eye watering 500+ years. And the Catholic Papacy has been going on continuously for closer to 2 millenia. But still, 249 years is pretty long in the tooth.

For that matter, look at Europe. France has gone through 5 republics and an empire since 1789 and they got a new constitution around 1958. (West) Germany has had three governments in the past 120 years, most recently in 1945. Spain has only been democratic since 1975. All of Eastern Europe has an entirely new state since 1989. Most of the smaller western countries got conquered by Germany in WWII. Even the UK in its current state is only since 1922, although that's a little unfair since I believe that was evolutionary; the last discontinuity was in 1660 if my history is correct.

Which surprises me; the US is doing really well.

Roman empire had ~500 year run on the western part, and 1500 years on the eastern. That's after another 500 republican years. Not too shabby.

And you can argue that it is still going. It just morphed into the Roman Catholic church.

I am guessing that the problem is worse where power is inherited. Just because the first guy in the dynasty was capable enough to make himself king and stay in power, doesn't mean his successors are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_San_Marino

San Marino has you beat, but obviously quite different scale.

The sheer bulk of the law is a huge problem, but there are very clear and well thought-out procedures for amending the Constitution. Cruft is all the felonies and misdemeanors you commit just commuting to work every day, not the Constitution, which can be read and more or less understood by anyone literate in a few hours.

> which can be read and more or less understood by anyone literate in a few hours.

The fact that the supreme court even exists shows that this is far from the whole truth. Besides that, and even if it were the case, there is a pretty clear effort underway to do an end-run around large chunks of that constitution.

The second amendment is literally the specified solution, not the problem.

Do they teach nothing of European history in America? Magna Carta? Basically the inspiration behind your constitution?

1215, still a few parts left as enforceable law today. If you think US institutions are old, try European ones. We're still supposed to practice longbow on Sundays.

America is middle aged, at best. You haven't even changed regime yet. Only every been a republic. Never changed religion.

How cute. Poor old Spain has been back and forth with absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republics and even a fascist dictatorship thrown in the mix.

To be fair, like 5% of the magna carta still carries weight as law today. The main framework of UK law doesn't come from the magna carta anymore.

> You haven't even changed regime yet. Only every been a republic

Right I think that's literally the point that GP was making? The US main legal framework is the same one from 250 years ago, which is not the case for the vast majority of Europe et al. Which leads to some weird interactions, and in some people's minds a lot of anachronisms. Like you gotta deal with the law written by armed revolutionaries protecting the right to own cannons and warships and whatnot (which continued pretty well into the 1800s), with the modern day of like.... maybe not allowing private ownership of 127mm naval guns or JDAMs.

>> We're still supposed to practice longbow on Sundays

Though no practice for Europeans.

The UK is a bit of an exception through, large parts of Europe have gone though at least some sort of revolution or a change in constitution in the last century, if not multiple. And the UK constitution isn't entrenched. Whenever the House of Commons wanted it to change to fit with the times it could be done. Imagine if the US constitution could be changed by a simple majority in the House of Representatives.

That's not a "problem" and not a "cruft" - it's how it was built by design. You may not like it - your right, of course, but don't pretend it's because it's "old" or "out of date". If the framers were alive right now, they'd insist on the same framework, and maybe made it even more robust, given how eroded those principles became over the years. They had a very particular set of ideas, how the relationship between the state and the people should work, and those ideas didn't change with time, they are still very actual and often at the center of the discussions. You may not agree with them - there was a lot of disagreement among the framers, and people who argued with them, too - but pretending you understand more just because you were born later is just arrogance. People 250 years ago weren't stupid.

My grandma is 80 and speaks 7 languages and is a professor and teaches classes.

She's smarter than me.

What you just said is agist.

There are incredibly smart and talented 12 year olds that are not allowed to vote due to age. Agism is pervasive in our culture, old and young, so we should ask if the discrimination is pragmatic or not. Moral or not. Legal or not.

While young people can be considered immature until certain age, old people have big taboo about senility and dementia. As you are not allowed to vote and drive until certain age, you should not be allowed to vote and drive since certain age, because your brain could be considered immature again through degeneration.

There's dumb black people and smart black people therefore black people are dumb. Its PRAGMATIC TO THINK THIS.

You see how stupid you sound?

That is a complete mischaracterization of what I was saying. There are multiple considerations, both legal and moral.

But pragmatism plays a role in the pervasive ageism in our culture, as we have decided it is largely legal.

If you're capable of abstraction I'm reframing your point EXACTLY.

Also, Discriminating based on age is largely legal.

Are you sure about that?

Omniman strikes again! https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1k3mqvs/the...

There is a saying that, in China, the top political career starts at 70.

I don't think the age is the problem. It's corruption.

Luckily there’s no corruption in China

At least corruption is sometimes punished in China. The agriculture minister was just given what's essentially a life sentence for corruption.

Sometimes isn't good enough. That's just selective enforcement, which is arguably worse than no enforcement at all.

No law is enforced absolutely on every offender. That's impossible. Selective enforcement is a problem, but I would never say it's worse than no enforcement unless the law is bad in the first place.

It is when it is mostly used as a weapon rather than as a law. And China, unfortunately, has quite a lot of that.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Life sentence or death sentence? "China's former agriculture minister Tang Renjian sentenced to death with reprieve for bribery", https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-former-minister-a...

From what I was reading, it sounded like the "with reprieve" essentially transforms the death sentence into a life sentence unless there's another crime committed. I may have misunderstood though.

Yeah, I think you're right according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_sentence_with_reprieve

> Death sentence with reprieve is a criminal punishment found in chapter 5 (death penalty), sections 48, 50 and 51 of the criminal law of the People's Republic of China. It is a two-year suspended sentence where the execution is only carried out if the convicted commits further crimes during the suspension period. After the period the sentence is automatically reduced to life imprisonment, or to a fixed-term based on meritorious behavior. The reprieve is integrated into the sentence, unlike a pardon which occurs after the sentence.

So during that 2 year period are you in prison?

Pretty hard to commit many crimes from there...

Or are you free, which seems a little odd...

This was common in Victorian England as well, I believe. I remember reading about it in the context of consensual “sodomy.”

Even the punishing of corruption in China is corrupt. The corruption is baked into to every level. Such that if an upper power is unhappy with a lower level for whatever reason, they can just push the punish switch and have them done away with.

The US is rapidly catching up here; already in the US if a higher power wants a lesser figure punished they can simply order an indictment, should anyone be foolish enough to resist such an order for lack of evidence of any actual serious crime, they can be replaced immediately with someone willing to bend and break the law with a straight face.

That must be thanks to abundance of freedom.

And somehow sentence from "The good, the bad and ugly" movie (state by Italy born actor) fit on that subject: "If you want freedom you become a priest or a bandit"...

And remember to all the time stick a smile to your face and, internet even, conversations. That is sure fire way to have everything look positive.

To be fair, corruption is also a problem in China. But still the consequences are much higher, if you think of province-level book-cooking and what happened to their leaders.

The incentives for policy making are much different in both countries.

Ya they’re all old lawyers

We have an age limit in so many fields. Being in congress should have one, too. Aging affects many parts of our brain (negatively) responsible for cognition.

It's lawyers. Definitely lawyers and copyright laws. You could also add corruption and age, but these are problems that can be found in China as well.

>"anyone above 75 is not all there" - this is pure BS

But yeah allowing Chuck Grassley to run at this young </s> age is pure insanity.

if we have a federal retirement age we should just use that

It's about more than just whether a congressperson is all there or not.

A bigger concern to me is that many of them are old enough that any long-term impacts resulting from bills they pass simply won't happen until they're gone.

And, I would expand that to include more than just Congress - I think major executive offices (e.g., President, VP, cabinet members, etc.) and the Supreme Court should have an age limit for the very same reason. Anyone in government office whose decisions can have long-lasting effects should be young enough they need to keep that in mind.

Anyone who (statistically) has only a few years left to live and especially anyone past the average life expectancy are welcome to hang around in advisory roles, but they should have limited (if any) power to directly affect future policy because they simply don't have any real skin in the game any longer.

Isn't family "skin in the game", in a fairly literal sense?

People don't come from nowhere, they have families, affiliations, communities etc. Politicians in particular are selected for this.

> Isn't family "skin in the game", in a fairly literal sense?

It is as long as the person really cares about their family. You sure they all do?

Their families are very well insulated from any negative consequences of their actions.

Both can be true. Old lawyers are probably the worst

Old people are voting for old people, because they are not going to vote for kids. Does not matter that the "kid" is 45 year old who is much more attached to everyday reality than old people.

Up until 40 years ago the US was run by lawyers. Now the US is run by MBA's and financial capitalists.

It’s less about them being “not all there” and more like the level of disconnected they are from modern society. The last time they had the average job (if ever) was before credit cards existed and it was $0.50 for a loaf of bread.

Many above 75 aren’t all there, but that doesn’t say anything about a specific person.

> I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.

The age of the senior senator from Iowa is like 537th on the list of major problems this country is facing.

I mean, let's be real. Would a bunch of spry 30-somethings in the senate have prevented the Assault on Tylenol or the coming invasion of Portland? Seems beyond dubious.

There are 13 Senators, out of 120, who are over 75, as far as I can see. I don't think we can attribute all the problems to them - there's not enough of them. I mean, some of the elders in Congress - like Pelosi, Waters, Nadler, Durbin, etc. - would do well to retire, but not every single one of them is "not all there". By a coincidence, I've met one of those 13 about a month ago (not personally, on an event, but it was a small event and I could see and hear him very well) and he certainly wasn't a youngster but I didn't see any obvious degradation of mental facilities. That said, I don't think term limits and mandatory retirement age is such a bad idea for top politicians, just don't expect it to fix much.

In the US, around the turn of the last century, it used to be that if you had an idea for a new invention, you could wander into any mid-sized city and have your pick of a dozen different a machine shops that could make you a prototype. It was an incredible time for innovation in this country, and a big part of the boom that led to the US ramping up from zero to the largest producer of war materiel in WW2.

That's how China is now. Any decent city will have machine shops and plastic injection molders and electronics makers, everything you need to get a new idea off the ground. They spent the last few decades stealing every good idea from the West, just like the US stole every good idea from Britain and Europe 120 years ago, and now they're well into the transition of being the innovation hub of the world.

I'd go a bit further and say it's not just access to a machine shop than makes it. I don't think I'm belong pedantic, but manufacturing has evolved since the 80's. If it were just access to a team of people with a couple of machines for metal, those aren't that difficult and those still exist, albeit far fewer of them. What China does have is one stop prototype to full stack mass manufacturing places. For even the simplist device, a machine shop won't do. You'll need (powder coating) painting, packaging design and manufacturing, and shipping. The attitude of the US machine shop is that it's your problem. "We're just a machine shop, you gotta deal with the rest yourself. Which, I mean, fine, but I don't want to become an expert in manufacturing products. My specialty is writing code for my product. Meanwhile, China's got a one stop shop to take my prototype that I ghetto rigged with cardboard and duct tape with a breadboard, and make iterate on a professional protoype with me, and then take it to a mass manufactured product I can sell to consumers, with a smile on their face. The Americans are going to make fun of me to my face for not knowing the difference between 316L vs A500 structural tube. Now, one could argue that I need to develop thicker skin, but fuck that. China's gonna do what I want without being a bag of dicks and help make me a pile of money. So tell me which one you'd choose.

Freakonomics: laundering conservative talking-points into "the npr set" for 20 years and still going.

The conservatives I know think it’s another mainstream democratic mouthpiece.

So I guess they’re doing something right.

No, just sounds like you know some dense conservatives.

A broken clock is right twice a day. America has some of the highest numbers of lawyers per capita by far out of developed nations. These lawyers do not work for us, most middle and low income people do not get legal representation that they need at all. You learn where these lawyers actually work when you work in corporate, and you see quickly how this single department has complete unilateral control over all operations of the organization. Everything goes through them and they can shut down anything. Even directives by the chief executive officer who is supposedly at the helm are crafted by legal.

And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.

Law is central to government. It makes sense for most politicians to have a background in law as opposed to, for an extreme example, real estate.

Is this the reason that America still doesn't have a national abortion law and had to rely on a sentence?

Yup, a lot of engineers here letting their egos be stroked. "Lawyers are bad people unlike me, a noble and rational engineer. If I controlled the government I would do things right, because I'm an engineer."

And as further evidence, this idea was already tried in the Soviet Union and it did not produce benevolent leaders free from human failings.

Any lawyer you personally know will tell you they are not qualified at all to even opine outside their very specific niche in the law. Merely being a lawyer does not mean you are qualified for office. I would argue the most qualified people for office are the aides and clerks for existing politicians who have spent years working in the sausage factory already. I would argue committee and cabinet appointments are generally terrible because once again, lawyers are chosen to run certain domain specific committees mainly for political reasons rather than domain experts from a given industry. See what happens when we get a laywer as the secretary of health and human services rather than a credible immunologist.

Lawyers approach arguments from both sides (so that they know where they are weak, where they are strogon), and know how to identify/tear apart BS. Engineers know how to present 'the correct position' once. The best engineers I knew benefited from having someone else in the company do their 'political' work for them. They were horrible at it themselves.

Uhh that is grossly simplifying the scientific process. How do you think they arrive at 'the correct position?' Empirically testing alternative hypotheses. It is lawyers that need to win once and just slip something past a judge. Engineering 'truths' if you could call them that are constantly reevaluated in light of new evidence, theory, and data.

This is why everyone should have at least a basic education in materialist analysis. Our material relations dictate the structure of society, not the other way around. China is a manufacturing economy, that's why it's run be engineers, and America is built on exploiting the productive capacity of the rest of the world, so of course there's lots of lawyers.

Are you implying that left wing ideas are always correct, and right wing ideas are always wrong? That seems very naïve, no?

I am not sure this makes conservatives sound great. They talk about how absolutely self-defeating Trump's policies are towards reshoring efforts. Freakonomics seems pretty genuinely centrist to me.

If you think Chicago School economics is centrist, then "centrist" is just another word for conservative.

Instead of classifying everything on a line to rhetorically suggest that you are objectively in the middle, recognize that there is a broad landscape of social, cultural, and economic positions.

Trump in fact acts contrary to most recommendations from Chicago economists, even though both are “conservative”.

You're misreading between the lines. I'm objectively on the left. As I understand things, there is no "line" and no "middle", except for media-types dispatched to hype the status-quo.

Then why are you surprised that a podcast/book about economics represents the dominant academic view of economics?

> dominant academic view of economics

Chicago School is the conservative view of economics, not the dominant view.

Would you say freakeconomics is presenting heterodox economic theory? And if so how?

Nondominant != heterodox.

Ok. I think this is becoming a pretty strained argument.

Leftists don’t generally like mainstream economics and subscribe to more niche segments. That’s ok - and there is a lot to criticize. But it’s also wrong that freakeconomics is peddling “conservative ideas” unless you do agree economics itself as an academic field is conservative coded.

this is wrong for economics. The dominant view among economists is largely homogenous.

It's the same thing you see in companies. Once you have something built that is making you comfortable, you get complacent and protective. And there's nothing sexy about maintenance.

(For instance, China wants to build best-in-world industry and infra, which they didn't have before, but they are not running their government in a growth- or building- engineering-driven sense. Not a lot of move-fast-and-break-things iteration there! Lots of people comfortable and protective of that system.)

Not any more it isn't. America is run by influencers now.

And failed reality TV stars.

He’s a successful reality TV star, and he has turned our whole political system into a reality TV show.

I like to think that the job of the president is to take care of the nation’s business so most of the rest of us can get on with our lives, but Trump demands constant attention, and he continually invents emergencies which prevent us from being able to just go about our existence in peace.

The never-ending narcissistic distraction is exhausting.

That's well known.

On the other hand, DOGE didn't go a great job running America.

IMHO, DOGE's result wasn't an engineering strategy to run a country, it was a businessperson's approach to running country.

"Data grab" is easier to write.

DOGE was an attack on every agency that MAGA didn't like.

The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.

Well DOGE also ran into a lot of obstructionism, and had to also move quickly due to the short political cycles America has. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is fundamentally bad.

I suspect, strongly, that we disagree on the fundamentals of what DOGE's aim was.

If DOGE was actually trying to make things more efficient, it would have made very different choices. Firing thousands of workers that you still have to pay for half a year is not efficiency, it's massive waste. Not only did DOGE not actually save money, it burnt a ton of money breaking things our government now has to fix.

Even if they had taken an extra month to learn the systems they were cutting into, would've saved many months of wasted employee-hours with what happened.

doge is a purposely incompetent and corrupt shitshow.

The concept was fundamentally bad though.

You cannot even say for certain what DOGE did, your only source is being politically biased.

At best doge was engineered cost cutting.

Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.

Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.

Engineers are cost cutters. Half of engineering is making decisions on how to build within budget. Building within tolerances and not overly engineering things

>Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

that's too much of a blanket statement.

as bushbaba said in a sibling comment, (paraphrasing), engineers can be both builders and cost cutters. and engineering is about tradeoffs of various kinds, even if they don't involve cost cutting.

ever heard of:

- value engineering

- frugal engineering

google them.

my dad was an engineer. not a software one, but a mechanical and electrical engineer. he did a double degree, from a well known US university. and worked for a few years in the US. then he came back to India and work for a single US multinational for the rest of his career.

once when I was a teenager, I saw him reading a book titled "value engineering". a us publication.

i think he mentioned it to me and said it was a good book.

I also read parts of it and found it interesting.

edited for grammar.

Yes I wasn't specific enough and contradicted myself.

I said anyone can be a cost cutter, and that includes engineers.

Where engineers are unique is in their ability and training to be efficiency and value creators. They are productivity increasers.

Their value comes from productivity increases - not their ability to cut budgets. Cutting a budget might be a side effect of a productivity increase, but the profitability increases that finance first leaders push for is often at the expense of long term productivity rather than because of it.

Hope that makes more sense!

I don't think this is really true about either country. America builds plenty. When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.

I agree. Also the US seems to be smarter about what to build: the US has not built cities the size of Manhattan that stand empty year after year like China has.

> When people talk about it not being able to build they really mean mass transit and to some extent certain types of housing in some areas. Everything else gets built just fine.

https://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140515737/california-turns-to...

immediately comes to mind

Theoretically you’re right. But having read the book, I agree with the general thesis. Things just move so much faster in China when it comes to making or building anything. Like I know firsthand people whose towns were converted from run-of-the-mill village to a T2 city in the span of a couple of decades. When hundreds of millions of people experience major change in their lives in front of their eyes, it’s a nit different than waiting for 5 years to start a new bridge across the river. I’m not even talking about factories, or policy course-corrections, or long-term goal settings either.

You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.

Its easier to upgrade a city when you can just move people out of their house. In the west its a nightmare to get anything changed because people own their spot and dont want to leave.

China moves so fast that by the time knowledge gets back to the West it’s often outdated. So my info should be checked.

But as I understand it China has been famous for “nail houses” - homes from which the owner refuses to move out, causing all kinds of headaches.

It isn’t a lawless place and the Party / local government doesn’t have carte blanche. There is nuance that’s worth considering before making blanket statements.

Yeah, people keep saying that Chinese build wherever they want to, whenever they want to. It's just not really true. It's correct that there are less bureaucracy (less environmental analysis, less consultation and etc.), but people still go and protest in their local areas when something happens that they don't like. There are people that don't move, but their lives become increasingly harder when they don't, because everyone else might take the money and go forward.

Sometimes it's also the opposite, the local government fight for the new build ups, so they can get the money and investments in. Or block development through their areas when there is no real reason to allow it (think of rails but with no stops there).

Faster is something of an arbitrary standard because speed is almost always a trade off with efficiency. A lot of China's speed comes down to cheap labor and inefficiently allocated capital.

We can keep using that excuse, but the reality is they're building, uplifting millions of people (obviously with some problems, but with the idea of "for the greater good"), and going forward with technology. Also, labour is actually not that cheap in China, compared to a decade+ ago.

On the same note, if we only talk about high speed rails, Spain has built up quite a network as well. Not as fast as China, but still. Labour isn't cheap over there at all, but seems like they figured some stuff out.

> inefficiently allocated capital

Every 6 months of US health spending above OECD baseline i.e. ~8% of GDP, aka ~2T/y buys you the entire HSR network in China, stations included. How inefficient is PRC capital allocation really? A few 10s of millions of extra housing units when they have 200-300m more people to urbanize? The point is PRC over allocates but quickly readjusts, i.e. even housing allocation basically capped in 2010s when new floor space peaked. The even more important point is PRC thinks it's important to over allocate and have in abundance than to have not enough. I argue most would prefer problems of over allocated abundance over under allocated scarcity.

Like US has plenty of cheap labour (mexicans), they just choose to exploit it maximally in some sectors (like agriculture), and partially (like construction), vs maybe maximally exploiting cheap labours in the latter would do US some good.

Also, the obsession with public transit coverage and walkability as some sort of benchmark for how well your country is doing is at best misguided and at worst ableist and ageist.

Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.

When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".

> Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living.

Is it though? I'm for public transit because one day I'll be of an age where I probably shouldn't be driving but am still able and independent enough to get around.

In a car-centric culture, what's the solution? Making the elderly take taxis or rideshares everywhere (assuming there is taxi services or Uber available where you live)? That feels like an ageist tax unless those services are heavily subsidized somehow. Or allowing the elderly to drive, which in my experience can be its own hazard both to drivers and everyone else.

Imagine your entire access to the world is decided by an insurance company and their willingness to insure your driving in old age.

When my mom was dying of cancer she was lucky our small town has a public shuttle bus system. She was not able to drive herself to her cancer support group at the end.

When my very poor grandparents came to visit in Santa Cruz they could not afford a rental car. We took the bus everywhere. I have so many memories with them thanks to public transportation. My grandfather had a very very painful artificial hip.

This is less because of any special attitude toward governance, and more because the only university degrees you could get during the Cultural Revolution were in engineering.

Does it matter if American elected officials are often lawyers if they don't read the bills they vote on? [0][1]. Or if the bills in questions often contain language copy-pasted from lobbyists' memos?

This topic runs the risk of being reduced to the same "Humanities v STEM" binary that so much of US public discourse has been reduced to. The real point of discussion should be that an engineering background may instill a political culture more focused on risk aversion, efficiency and longevity. A lawyer-heavy political culture may end up in the arena of "let's see what we can get away with".

Do these highly simplified stereoptypes apply to contemporary America? I'm not sure if an America led by the likes of Zuck, Ellison, Andreessen etc would end up differently from the one we see today. Whatever particularly genius they were able to leverage into massive wealth, they are all ultimately subservient to the same national culture of short-term gains, popularity contests and superficial macho posturing that afflict the political class.

What goes unsaid in this podcast is that a large number of CCP officials have a military background as well which inherently instills a a long-term view of governance, whereas the most successful American politicians with a pro-military stance (GWB, DT) have routinely denigrated rival politicians who served their country (John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth) while maintaining, not coincidentally, a low profile while in public office.

[0]:https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/penn-statim/dont-be-silly...

[1]: https://www.heritage.org/commentary/congress-read-it-voting

Its a long podcast, I'll respond to the title lol

But I would probably say America is run by mbas, not lawyers.

Is the answer "you only need lawyers if you don't live in a totalitarian state?"

How is not being run by lawyers the same thing as not needing lawyers? You think it's impossible for the US to be run by non-lawyers?

No, I think it's impossible for China to be run by lawyers.

America is run by entertainers, at the moment…

as it was repeatedly in the past (Reagan, Schwarzenegger and a bunch of others local officials). Circus sells.

True, though having unelected entertainers running e.g. the DoD, FBI, and Medicare is something new, I'd think!

One factor is how much agreement is needed to get going.

It’s a lot easier to agree what should get built when

a) you can point to wealthy nations and say “lets try to have what they have”

and

b) you’ve seen projects go fast and deliver big in your own country done by people just like you.

By contrast in the US it’s often a debate over which incremental improvement to make and why; without unilateral clarity on outcomes or value.

This “run by lawyers” / “run by engineers” claim is a symptom of that difference - it’s a byproduct, it’s not the core problem needing solving.

He also wrote this recently:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-amer...

If that is true - which I don't think it is - then I am happy I live in a country run by lawyers. I am not a huge fan of lawyers, but at least lawyers do not put millions of people into concentration camps and don't disassemble them into organs. Maybe it's appropriate to call those people "social engineers" but I wouldn't like to be a subject to that kind of engineering.

> Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct.

This is kind of the criticism that’s provided in Abundance. American Progressives intentionally made it extremely difficult to build anything by giving everyone a veto to block anything they don’t like.

There’s a lot of people on the Left (Center Left, at least) who want to revisit this approach and make it easier to build things again.

I also want to note that they point out that the current administration has a policy of scarcity. Even if we get rid of a lot of regulation, tariffs, deportations, and high government deficits make it hard to buy materials, hire labor, and finance projects.

> There’s a lot of people on the Left

Great, I guess then it won’t be too difficult to name ..say.. five prominent politicians who have made this stance clear?

The governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, has been very pro-housing. She liked my 'legalize housing' hoodie so much she wanted a photo with it: https://bsky.app/profile/tinakotek.bsky.social/post/3lkea36k...

In California Gavin Newsome has talked it and signed some stuff loosening CEQA, we'll see what happens with SB79. As for four more - just grab some of the authors/supporters of SB79.

Gavin Newsom is not a 'Leftist'. He destroyed a homeless encampment on camera. He would be mad you implied this. His first guest on his podcast was the late Charlie Kirk. Leftists I know have already sworn to never vote for him under any circumstance. Sincerely, how did you ever come to believe this?

He's "a prominent politician" and absolutely part of the "Center Left" as defined in US politics.

Good luck with your purity tests of course, and hope you like the Trumps of the world instead!

(Curious though - what parts of homeless encampments are leftist? Supporting them would seem to be more of a libertarian POV vs a collective solution to provide something better?)

Since Reagan and Clinton, the US has a center right party with a left flank and a center right party with a right flank. This is the beating heart of neoliberlism. MAGA is what happens when the right flank overtakes the entire party. You have to travel to other countries if you want to see an active left movement.

"hope you like the Trumps of the world instead!"

Newsom is not a presidential candidate, so this is not the only option. Instead, the Dems should run candidates with real convictions and better policies. Newsom believes in nothing, same as Buttigieg, Harris and Clinton. There is no one they wouldn't sell out for a taste of power. The Dem reaction to Bernie, years ago, and Zohran now tells us everything we need to know about how they feel about 'vote blue no matter who' when an actual SocDem wins a primary.

It is not a 'purity test' to demand politicians respond to public pressure with the understanding that, if they don't, they will lose votes. The sooner you tell them your terms, the better.

Harris chose to ignore the genocide and lost votes to Trump, who lied and promised to 'end wars'. She muzzled Walz in favor of her SV weirdos. She has the political instincts of a cabbage, which is why she dropped out first in the last primary.

"what parts of homeless encampments are leftist?"

Homeless encampments are not an ideology, they are an externality of the housing market requiring 'number go up'. A market means someone (the poor and disabled) won't be able to afford what is on offer.

Dismantling homeless encampments is a violent act. That's everything they have in the world. This kind of sociopathy has no wide constituency. Even if the staunchest NIMBYs don't want to see the homeless (it feels like crime!), they also don't want to see them abused on camera. Newsom is a demon for doing it live.

The Left 'solution', such as is, is to provide housing. This is also the economical solution. If you have a stable address and shelter, you don't waste money on ER visits and jail time, which cost more money from the same purse.

It's not rocket science, but it is politically untenable because the private housing market is load bearing for American middle class wealth.

Also, folks feel like if you are poor, you should be punished for it and housing feels like a reward. The gut reaction of too many Americans is they'd rather jail the homeless at twice the price than provide them an apartment free from sun and rain.

This same principle explains the immigration 'policy' on display in American cities. The recent ICE allocations could revive medicaid, end child hunger, raise classroom salaries, alleviate homelessness, create a federal public works program, and subsidize drug prices... but instead we get defunct concentration camps in swamps that cost billions and roaming masked kidnappers that have a daily bounty on the heads of uber drivers.

Everything is relative. You need to define your political spectrum relative to the society it exists in. "The US doesnt have a left party" just makes you sound like a sore loser who is mad the voters disagree with your policy prescriptions

The bigger issue might be confusing “progressives” with “NIMBYs”. There are plenty of people across the political spectrum that want to build more as well as people blocking the building. Progressives particularly are aggressive on the desire for more housing. Literally to the point that Nyc and other large cities see huge handouts to developers (even when those developers continuously under deliver on affordable housing).

The NIMBY/YIMBY divide really doesn't fall along traditional political lines. There are very progressive people who are raging NIMBYs, as well as very conservative NIMBYs. There are both progressive and conservative YIMBYs too.

Yeah, NIMBYism - especially in single-family-home neighborhoods - is huge in wealthy parts of Texas, Florida, etc.

(Not coincidentally, those are all less dense places, with less public transit and infrastructure, than the well-known progressive states and cities.)

Exactly what I was saying, thanks for the clarification. It’s a blanket view point to blame progressives for the state of the Usa when we’ve been mostly moderate. Regardless of fault the views are shared across the spectrum on all sides.

It depends on the progressive, however. Yes, I’m hearing more calls to build from progressives. However, for a long time between the 1960s until the past few years, there were two drivers of NIMBYism that progressives championed: (1) local control of neighborhoods and (2) environmentalism. The first was a reaction to urban development plans of the 1950s and 1960s that fundamentally reshaped neighborhoods, but often in ways that did not consider the residents of those neighborhoods. For example, San Francisco once had a historical Japanese American and African American district named The Fillmore with plenty of Victorian homes, but this was largely demolished in the 1960s and replaced with housing projects and a widened Geary Blvd. While I’m still on San Francisco, there were plans in the 1950s to build a network of freeways criss-crossing the city. This was deeply unpopular.

Unpopular plans to dramatically reshape urban cities led to “freeway revolts” (organized, grassroots opposition to freeway projects, which sometimes succeeded) and increased local input over planning. The second was brought on by environmental crises in the 1960s, such as badly polluted rivers and the famous oil spill near Santa Barbara. California, especially its coastal areas, was quite affected by both drivers of NIMBYism, and this became the dominant way of thinking from the 1970s onward.

Local control over neighborhoods sounds reasonable, but unfortunately it’s led to neighborhoods being museum pieces that do not scale upwards to meet demand, thus incentivizing urban sprawl. Restricting development had also significantly boosted the property values in those areas. However, urban sprawl directly conflicts with environmental goals, since it requires more transportation infrastructure and more energy to move people across longer distances than across shorter distances. Thus, we end up with situations where homes get built in far-flung exurbs whose politicians support growth (until the towns get large enough to where some residents want to halt growth to “preserve our quality of life,” thus pushing development to the next closest area friendly to development), environmentalists blocking road-widening and other infrastructure-improving efforts in an attempt to stop/discourage the sprawl, and NIMBYs blocking the construction of denser housing near job centers that could have provided affordable alternatives to exurban housing.

This has been the story of California since the 1970s, and the obscene housing prices and unsustainable mega-commutes are a result of this. Thankfully more people are seeing the consequences of 50 years of broken housing policy, and we’re finally seeing some efforts, even if they’re baby steps, to address this.

Canada is like this (possibly worse). Nobody ever wants to do the ostensible thing that they say they are doing, if that makes sense.

Take some kind of government procurement, say to buy a truck. The truck ends up being a pretense for all sorts of political things like regional development or righting some perceived historical inequality, doing an environmental study, subsidising some industry that's not doing well. Nobody cares about actually getting the truck.

I can imagine a world where they just buy the best truck and don't try to make it a pretext for wealth redistribution and solving all the worlds problem, but I've never seen it.

Multiply this by every single things the government spends money on (and in canada the oligopolies as well) and you see why nothing happens.

1% of people make decisions of what to build and how in any real sense. A movement ("abundance") to exclude the other 99% from having a say is not a left movement, the left is the opposite of that. Only in the US where class relations are so lopsided on the side of the heirs over the workers could that idea be called left.

>American Progressives intentionally made it extremely difficult to build anything by giving everyone a veto to block anything they don’t like.

It is reaction to the old situation when interests of a small guy were completely tramped by the big guys - ie. the situation of private profits, public losses. And we can't go back to it.

The first step to move forward is to give everybody, whose interests are negatively impacted by a project, a stake in the project's benefits/profits. Ie. private profits - private losses, and public losses - public profits.

The "Left" has never held any meaningful power in this country. Blaming the Progressives for this sad state of affairs is not only completely wrong, it's extremely disingenuous.

If you're speaking of the Democrats, they've been following the Neoliberalist playbook to the letter for decades: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes. This (the housing crisis) is the direct result of their half-competent technocratic stewardship of the economy. (And let's not spare the actually malevolent Republicans from sharing the blame in turning this land from an actual country into a billionaire's playground).

This "Abundance" movement is to be taken as a rebranding of the same tired and destructive Neoliberalist policies, and nothing else. It is ported by the same old people and politicians that have been slowly running this country to the ground. There is absolutely nothing new to be found in their manifestos: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes.

Housing can either be affordable or an investment vehicle, but not both at the same time. Actual leftists understand this very basic premise, but the astroturfed Abundance "movement" remains blind to it. Left-wing populism is slowly gaining ground in the face of an extremely complacent and ineffective Democratic establishment, and Abundance is a last-ditch effort to sold democratic voters on the same garbage they've been eating since the 1980s.

The one thing Democrats and Republicans always agree on is "No Progressive's allowed".

Indeed. Progressives are an existential threat to the current geriatric establishment owning the party, and they recognize them as such. They would sooner see the country in the hands of fascists than enact a single left-wing policy. Just look at Schumer, Kamala and their pals still refusing to endorse Mamdani, the one Democrat that has been able to generate any amount of momentum in years.

To the Republicans, Progressives are a political force they might actually have to try winning elections against, if the latters are ever able to muster a modicum of power inside of the party that is supposed to house them. A progressive Democratic party with populist messaging would certainly mean they can't rely on the absolute ineptitude of their opponents campaigning anymore.

It’s not progressives. It’s NIMBYism, which is cross-party.

The USA has two right-of-center parties, and no credible left-of-center party. That they call it left and right is a massive misdirection and should not fool anybody, but unfortunately it does.

The abundance folks are Reagan Era neolibs and conservatives. They want to 'revisit' an imagined past. The reality is they wish to retvrn to is the exact moment Reagan and Clinton broke the New Deal. We must first remake a Deal to break it once more, they're skipping steps.

Their proximate goals are to break the remaining unions and environmental protections we have, in service of the 'free market' which definitely is real and important. They want to give up on 'social issues' like access to reproductive care, medicare for all, and supporting the marginalized.

The speaker list includes the AEI, The Manhatten Institute, R street, Niskanen Center, etc...

American Leftists and Progressives do not hold power and the 'barriers' that abundance claims exist were put in place by those with power, not AOC or Zohran or whatever local cabal they point to in the book. Cherry-picking Austin as their exemplar is worth its own comment, but the book is frustrating across the board.

Klein has missed every moment of late and I expect the trend to continue.

Regardless, if your primary critique on a lawless and deeply authoritarian administration is their 'policy of scarcity', then you have utterly lost the plot. Mussolini made Italians grow and eat rice to induce a feeling of scarcity, there is no doubt, but that is not anyone's primary critique of his tyranny.

This is a tech forum, and we like to think engineers make the world.

But it's quite possible that the rule of law, capitalism, freedom, democracy, western institutions, etc. is what allows engineers to build stuff.

Technology advances when it is financed.

Yes - full disclosure, I am a lawyer, so I am biased and perhaps sensitive about this stuff. But I see a lot of this kind of tribalism on HN. Engineers can do no wrong, lawyers and accountants can do no good.

By the way, the main point of the book is “China needs more lawyerism, America needs less of it” if that makes you feel better. A lot of people seem like didn’t read it before discussing it, but a good chunk of it discusses problems in Chinese structure as well.

It's the difference between people who understand that the physical world is real, and a bunch of innumerate conmen. Both of them might rob you, but the latter will often end up killing you both in the attempt.

How can we conclude anything about China without knowing its political internals, business culture, detailed proceedings and anything else we might need right away?

The Soviet Union Politburo also had a lot of engineers. "43 percent of Politburo members attained higher education credentials during their life, while in a close second place, 32 percent of members earned an education in technical engineering." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Par...

FWIW, Brezhnev was a metallurgical engineer.

While I think the Soviet Union comparison would be relevant to the article, the only connections I could find are:

> At various points in China’s recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering, and this was engineering of a very Soviet sort.

and

> ... what the Chinese are interested in is being an engineer of the soul, which is a phrase from Joseph Stalin that Xi Jinping has recently repeated.

Note that Stalin's phrase is, more fully, "As comrade Olesha aptly expressed himself, writers are engineers of human souls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_of_the_human_soul

and Xi Jinping's is:

"In 2018, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, stated that “Teachers are the engineers of the human soul and the inheritors of human civilization. They carry the important task of spreading knowledge, spreading ideas, spreading truth, shaping soul, shaping life, and shaping newcomers. The fundamental task of education must be nurturing capable young people well-prepared to join the socialist cause. Better education and guidance are needed to build the noble ideal of Communism and the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics among the students.”"

That comes across as less top-down or state-controlled than implied in the text, and more metaphorical.

Hu and Jiang were engineers, but Xi isn’t. After the schools re-opened, he was rushed through an accelerated program at Tsinghua and given a degree in chemical engineering, and then went off to be an official full time never actually doing any engineering work. He is a pure official like his father, and unlike his predecessors, never even bothered learning a foreign language.

As much as I think of his background and his authoritarianism (getting rid of the two term rubber stamp for the presidency), he has actually delivered for China. This is the most dangerous part: imagine if Trump was actually smart, if he actually delivered, we would be really confused about democracy.

How do we have political topics in this forum without the discussions devolving into quick quips and rhetoric?

America was founded by lawyers

That would be an indictment of engineers! luckily it's a silly caricature

I listened to Dan Wang on this podcast [1] and found his talking points around industrial policies interesting. His take around how China managed to do capitalism better than US when it comes to EV & Solar panels (if he's not wrong):

massively fund the industry as a political / social objective, set (artificial) demand and create a local market by restricting import / competition for a while, then cut funding gradually when there's a sprawling eco system of startups, letting them brutally cannibalize each other leading to consolidation (such as BYD) to create global leaders.

Is not uniquely Chinese but are just tactics out of Japan, Korea and even Germany (historically).

I can kinda understand the point that this process works better when there are some technical people in power, such as engineers. They can probably reason timing and industry a little better: Solar was pioneered by US but industrialized by Germany but then out competed by China.

Yesterday at a conference I came to know the history of bipedal/quadrupedal robot development by a MIT professor, claiming most of the Chinese robots are just descendant of that technological choices made by MIT research.

Humanoid robotics seems to just be in that process of "massively fund the industry" in industrial policies (I saw so many humanoid robot companies at the conference, Chinese, that I haven't even heard of). To me I guess the "why now?" is the question, and I guess some technical person must've been in the process of making that decision.

We can't really emulate the political system of China, but that mindset of having technical/expertise close to power is probably something we shouldn't forget. Especially in a era where political positions seems to be handed out based on loyalty than merit

[1] https://youtu.be/ZNK3vNg13XA?feature=shared

I watched the same podcast/interview. Dan Wang expresses his views in a very neutral tone, only on the things he knows. There are some subjective statements, but they seem balanced to me and didn't find anything that was hard to believe.

Odd lot has a good episode on him too!

China is run by people with a long term plan of becoming a world superpower through industrialization on a gigantic scale. The US is alternating between two rival factions, who's number one goal is reversing the effects of whatever the other faction did. My home country, Germany, is a total clown show which still hasn't decided if it wants to keep being an industrial nation.

It really is very easy to figure out who is going to come out on top.

Old but good.

Nope, China is run by the Chinese Communist Party, which itself is run by Xi. That's it. Just look at Jack Ma for a clear example that China is not run by engineers or tech people.

As far as I know, this isn't true. Many members of the CCP have engineering degrees. A relevant podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1TeeIG6Uaw

What exactly isn't true? That Xi doesn't control the CCP?

And presumably they also have doctors and even lawyers in the CCP! Come to think of it, I wonder if China is not actually run by lawyers as well...

My understanding is that Xi’s control actually slipping and it isn’t complete control like a standard dictator

I thought he had purged his opposition under the cover of anti-corruption drives?

He did yes but more recently seems like there’s been a coup behind the scenes and Xi is more of a figurehead.

See: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/all-eyes-beijings-ann...

Interesting. I hope that is good news for Taiwan.

Xi is a chemical engineer.

Alibaba being told to drop their fintech ventures and instead focus on deeptech (semiconductors and ai) is one of the clearest examples of China’s leadership of engineers setting priorities.

That is purely driven by national security priorities, I mean, _clearly_. The engineering is just how you work towards meeting those priorities. If it had been making candy or melting ice then you can bet that's what they were going to focus on.

look into the nitty gritty of the cultural revolution, and it's very specific focus on technology

jack ma got a modern day "re-education" tailored to his specific circumstsnces, but as always in these situations the offer is "lead? or gold? your choice!"

>look into the nitty gritty of the cultural revolution, and it's very specific focus on technology

As I understand it, the cultural revolution was mainly about young people running amok and victimizing teachers and authority figures. All orchestrated by Mao so he could cling to power. What did it have to do with technology?

Perhaps you meant the 'great leap forward'?

Could you please update your references? China has been run by Mao's enemies for a very long time (likely longer than you've been alive), and the Cultural Revolution was a desperate ploy to consolidate power when the current way of Chinese thinking was growing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticize_Lin%2C_Criticize_Con...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader

Yeah I think the better metaphor is China is run by one person, and America is run by a set of rich people and rich companies pursuing various profit and pet interests.

I think that is a good starting point.

A good starting point would be to read about the organization of the ccp, but yeah let's say your very simplistic take that fits in a single sentence surely encompass everything we need to know. I'd even go further and simplify it even more: "China bad"

Well, definitely not "China bad" but absolutely "CCP bad". That's not even up for discussion.

That is a very naive way of looking at things. There’s Politburo of 7, and even if we ignore other high rankings, provinces have huge amount of control over the way they’re ran. There are like 1.4B people in the country, it’s kinda funny to imagine that everyone just works and acts the same way.

But the CCP does promote based on merit and accomplishment for the most part.

So, you are saying China is run by a chemical engineer? Xi studied that at Tsinghua University.

Nailed it on the head. China is a dictatorship.

China is run by the state, which employs the engineers.

The West is run by finance capital, which employs the lawyers (and buys the politicians).

There was a post here a while back about engineering grads in the UK who couldn't get engineering jobs. So they ended up working for quant firms and banks instead.

Under neoliberalism the economy ends up oriented away from productive activity and toward rent-seeking and wealth transfers. Hence the growing gambling "industry", the pump and dump crypto scams (run by heads of state, no less), the legally protected private cartels like banking and medicine. We get people like Vivek Ramaswamy who became a billionaire while producing nothing of value.

Pinning these massive systemic issues on lawyers is frankly stupid. They are just one piece of the puzzle.

No, bullshit artists.

我觉得在HN上面，很多黑客过于天真，对威权国家抱有梦幻滤镜，因为他们离得足够远。所以，此类文章，隔三差五在首页出现。

而对于一直生活在这里的人们，这是两回事。有句笑话说，我可以捐款100万，因为我没有，但是我不能捐一头牛，因为我真的有。

----

I think many hackers on HN are overly naive, holding a dreamlike view of authoritarian states because they're so far away from them. Therefore, articles like these appear on the front page regularly.

But for people who have lived here their entire lives, it's a different story. There's a joke that goes, "I can donate 1 million yuan because I don't have it, but I can't donate a cow because I actually do have it."

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