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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12739 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?).

I find this topic very irksome, for reasons that can be gleaned from some jingoistic comments below. "Breakneck" is also an annoying gimmick. They're not engineers. They've got a ton of engineers but the CPC is still heavy on lawyers and straight up apparatchiks.

China is completely non-mysterious. Any specific domain, like HSR, is pointlessly nitpicked at and debated but matters little in isolation, and the big picture is very straightforward and expressed in their official messaging. Maybe the thickest layer of obscurity is official translation. For example: «中华人民共和国». «People's Republic of China». Character by character: something like "The Middle Splendid Land's People's Common-Harmony State". That's what they intend to be.

It is a modern (as opposed to postmodern) state, with Leninist ideology, built on top of Chinese Confucian civilization, with enormous, high-IQ population, led by a man who's passed through hardship and one of the most competitive and cutthroat filters in any system ever, a product of Party-arranged marriage between two other Communist zealots. I think Xi's character is actually misunderstood and important, especially given what the Superpower Number One has got. To get a feel for it, I recommend reading this interview (1, 2) on a book about his father Xi Zhongxun (btw, he's the guy who invented Special Economic Zones among other things). An excerpt:

Jon Sine: This one is from 1976, the very late years, near the finale. At this point, Deng is being widely denounced and criticized. Yang Ping goes into Xi Zhongxun’s apartment at 8 p.m. one night:

“Yang was surprised to find Xi drinking strong cheap liquor and crying alone in the dark. Xi explained that it was his son Jinping’s birthday. Xi said, ‘Your father is better than I am; he took such good care of you. I am also a father, but because of me . . . Jinping only narrowly escaped death!’ Xi then proceeded to tell Yang about Jinping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Yang later wrote, ‘That night, Old Xi spoke to me, and at the same time, he cried. He kept saying he had let down everyone in his family. He said that in terms of taking care of his entire family, his behavior had been criminal and so on. One could say that his emotional state was approaching a total lack of control. It made me feel extremely sad. Normally, his words would be very concise. He wasn’t verbose, and he didn’t repeat himself. He definitely was never incoherent.’”

At the end of this same paragraph is the thing that stuck with me the most — Xi Jinping comes to visit him a few days later. They’re both sweltering because it’s summer and they’re both sitting in their underwear smoking as Jinping recited Mao speeches from memory while Xi Zhongxun watched. At some point near the end of the book, you say that we shouldn’t necessarily think of Xi Jinping as thinking, “How could I be loyal to a party that treated my father so badly?,” but rather the inverse — “My father sacrificed so much for the party, yet still is this loyal, and still wants me to be reciting Mao speeches. How could I ever transgress that party?” In some ways, this underwear incident actually helped make that stick a little bit more for me.

Basically, to understand China the easiest strategy is to stop coping, take them at their word about what they are and what they're doing, and watch as things become predictable. How cutting-edge capabilities are deployed faster and at larger scale, how air is getting cleaner, how problems just get solved (except profound structural ones no society knows how to solve – like fertility or real estate bubble, which they are deflating), how in 7 years of «slowing down» or «collapsing» they go from taking American export controls lying down to retaliating so severely that Trump is pressed to concede. How we go from «haha Huawei will die» to «please buy H200s». These are a people and a system that is very good at completing tasks. It's how a state should be. Its values may be alien, but operationally, all serious modern states were similar. Some mix of dirigisme and free market, competent leadership with skin in the game, investment into human capital, infrastructure buildout. The US was this. "Datacenter buildout" is not this. Does anyone seriously think they will have trouble building sheds with lots of cooling and grid connection. They have the world's best HVDC system, they ate several major markets in the last 5 years, their heavy machinery is penetrating German/Japanese markets already. They'll be fine.

What merits explanation is not China but the dysfunction of Western societies, the decline of civilization really.

I'd broadly agree with this. China isn't doing anything especially secretive or complicated but in the meantime the West is exuberantly actively working to derail functional society it feels.

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