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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.

tl;dr, Tyler's views —

  1. Suburbs good, cars and highways good
  2. HSR/mass transit overrated (but we should still do better)
  3. America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
  4. American Healthcare + rate of healthcare spending good
  5. China pandemic response bad, America pandemic response good

Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:

COWEN: A very simple question. Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China? Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?

WANG: America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine...

I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports.

COWEN: Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher...Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all.

And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.

WANG: I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits.

COWEN: This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there.

On the pandemic and vaccines:

COWEN: That seems wrong to me. US underperformed by different bureaucratic measures, but what really mattered for saving lives and reopening was vaccines.

WANG: I agree.

COWEN: On that, US overperformed. China is miserable at the bottom of the barrel. They even had the Pfizer contract and wouldn’t even use those vaccines. They used their own inferior vaccines because they didn’t have a society of lawyers who would go crazy suing everyone. US, I think, in pandemic, everyone did terribly, but US got the vaccines, got them quickly, way ahead of schedule, and did certainly much better than China.

And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:

WANG: ...What I am always asking is, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives?

COWEN: Which is likely, right?

WANG: Which is likely. They’re on track to do that. Right now, they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. They may continue gaining share, in part because they’re deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The US has mostly already deindustrialized itself, so it’s not in the firing line. At some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America’s manufacturing industries. They’re going to make all the drones. They’re going to make much of the electronics.

I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?

Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.

Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).

Lots to comment on here (to start with, comparing American suburb life to anything China has to offer is a featherweight match between two very mediocre lifestyles, in a global comparison), but the thing that particularly stuck out to me is

America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)

In what sense are AI datacenters a mark of state capacity/building ability? They just take some off-the-shelf hardware (fabricated elsewhere) and stick lots of it in a room with some ventilation and power supply. China had unemployed miners do the same thing in soot-choked shacks in the desert for Bitcoin mining, and I here they do that with cellphone farms for scamming in the Cambodian jungle. In fact the scam farms are more impressive, since they usually come with some slave labourer camp/brothel/casino compound for tens of thousands of people attached and are actually just created ex nihilo in the middle of nowhere.

And more to the point... I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build. But between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should' and thus things only get built if someone is enthusiastically willing to fund the process. Once they do, things happen very fast.

With Datacenters, we have motivated buyers utterly flush with cash so the cost obstacle is surmounted, at which point all the other steps can be done.

As I'm fond of pointing out, Florida built a high-speed rail system before California even broke ground on theirs because there were many many fewer unnecessary obstacles to doing it. Simple as.

I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build.

There are three issues here - a skill level issue where the hard costs of a big project are a lot higher than they would be in a country that didn't suck, a political culture issue where either NIMBYs kill the project or soft costs explode fighting them off, and a bloat issue where projects get overspecified because it isn't anyone's job to control costs.

As regards large-scale civil engineering, the US has all three problems, such that the overall cost of new roads is 3-5x the cheapest European countries * and the cost of new rail infrastructure is 5-10x (10-20x in NYC).

With data centres, I suspect the skill level issue is mitigated because Google and suchlike can hire first-rate people to do unglamorous work in a way neither the government nor the big construction contractors can. The NIMBY issue can be managed by building in red states, or by Big Tech buying the Government of California en bloc. I suspect Google eats the bloat, and Elon personally trims bloated projects at 3am with his hands while shitposting with his feet, or some other similar feat of workaholism.

* Per Alon Levy, these are Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the less corrupt parts of Italy. France is slightly better than average, Germany slightly worse, and the UK shockingly bad when compared to anywhere except North America.

between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should'

I think an important aspect is that those things largely don't apply to data centers in the same way they do to any public infrastructure or factories. A data center is essentially just a large building with power and network connectivity and cooling. There is no real noise or chemicals involved so safety regulations don't apply and of course it isn't a public building so the local politicians or interest groups don't get a say. It also doesn't have to be located in city center so there's no "social" aspect and in general the location is not critical so NIMBYism is much less important.

And yet you get people screaming about water and electricity usage (being fair, the latter is a concern).

They have successfully shut them down before:

https://www.kold.com/2025/12/02/county-city-leaders-amazon-pulls-out-embattled-project-blue/

https://wsbt.com/news/local/st-joseph-county-council-denies-rezoning-of-land-for-data-center-votes-7-2-marathon-meeting-hours-long-public-opinion-13-billion-dollar-project-amazon-new-carlisle-approval-process-plan-commission-st-joseph-county-indiana

https://www.fauquiernow.com/news/warrenton-town-council-passes-resolutions-to-address-legal-disputes-in-amazon-data-center-cases-halt/article_6f98e20c-d36c-11ef-885a-9bc61bdcc17c.html

I agree with your overall point, datacenters are less objectionable than average... so imagine what building anything more objectionable would take!

Let me just say for the record, I am SO glad that NASA exists simply because by building out their facilities at Cape Canaveral back when Florida was barely populated, we've got a large rocket launch complex that didn't have to be built in barely accessible mountains or something. Can you imagine the fuss residents would put up if someone suggested building 40 launchpads near a populated area?

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