Lawyers vs Engineers

 

Unfortunately for me, my flu lasted longer than a week, and I have to do the unthinkable: stop creating videos because I have no voice. I can't sell courses either, as my previews last 2 hours and will make my recovery even slower. So my YouTube video is just injecting shorts at a rate of once a day until I am ready to create videos again.

But this means that I can create a blog article in the middle of the week, so today I'm going to talk about possibly the best book about China vs the US at the moment, which is Breakneck by Dan Wang.

Dan reframes the entire contest between two superpowers not as a struggle between Capitalism and Communism, but as a contest between an engineer-led society versus a lawyer-led one. China's engineer-led approach can uplift millions out of poverty, and decision-making is quick. But literal-minded engineers can also mess up terribly and lead to atrocities, like the One-Child and Zero-COVID policies. In contrast, the US is a nation being led by lawyers, and while checks and balances are outstanding in theory, lawyers tend to obstruct the good and the bad. It's clear that the US needs physical infrastructure badly, but gridlocked politics make it resemble a society in infrastructural decline. Dan's conclusion is that instead of focusing on their rivalry, both superpowers can learn from each other. China can build more checks and balances and give people a bigger voice in how things are done. The US can afford to remove red tape and ramp up its construction powers.

I can understand why Singapore has done well so far. 

We've balanced the lawyer and the engineer well. We were ruled by a lawyer during the LKY years, but he worked well with engineering types, and we were very much of an engineered society in the 60s to the 80s. Amazingly, Lee Hsien Loong, a mathematician, actually created a more consensus-driven society along with the support of lawyers like K Shanmugam. 

But what kind of a function is required to emphasise the lawyer or the engineer as and when needed? Singapore is driven mainly by economists. Utilitarian calculus and cost-benefit analysis are necessary to understand how to reform the rules for continuous innovation and improvement. This is how nation-states evolve beyond the engineer-lawyer tradeoff. 

If a society can transcend lawyer-engineer duality with strong economics, then we will need to understand societies that do not excel in either field, nor are they sound engineers or lawyers.

It's not too hard to find societies that suck at building or creating order. But I want to talk about the case of Europe, which is in severe decline. Just look at the French and how their government is collapsing in front of our eyes.

While politically incorrect, these are Philosopher societies. So much navel gazing and theorising that society is crippled from building and unable to stop things like strikes and crimes. A historian might get a brain aneurysm reading this. Still, my theory on why the Roman Empire fell is that when the Romans conquered Greece, they fell in love with Hellenism, adopted Greek Gods, and, as a result, became enamoured with ethical questions about virtue, happiness, all the humanistic shit that can't put food on a table or jail a tyrant. 

The Roman Empire fell because it got woke. 

For folks who are curious about China and frustrated with the unbalanced reporting in The Economist or various propaganda organs coming from the mainland, I would say Dan Wang is the best read so far.

This blog has written about Red Roulette by Desmond Shum. 

Another excellent book on China is by Keyu Jin called The New China Playbook.