Britain Sounds Clever, So Why Can't It Build? | Dan Wang

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0:31Dan Wang:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today's guest is China expert Dan Wang and I found reading his book on China one of the most interesting things that I have read this year partly because he talks about the recent economic revolution that's happened there the kind of domestic policy interventions that have happened around the one child policy and it's a really great insight into how China is adapting and changing to the new era.

1:23You'll enjoy this episode if you enjoyed our episode with Ed Conway as well where we talked about how China has become so strong on electric vehicles. If you want to understand the modern day global economy, you have to understand China. And this is the best episode that we have done recording on it. So welcome to this episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future with Dan Wang. Dan, thank you so much for coming on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. You have just written a brilliant book. Well, not just written, it's been out for a little while. China's quest to engineer the future on, and it's called Breakneck.

1:57I found it a fascinating read comparing China and America and the way that they approach their society and state. I almost missed your afterwards. And I was going to start. Oh, no, that's the best part. Exactly. So I just wanted to start with this. For better or worse, it is still China and the United States that are remaking the world. The mausoleum economy of Europe remains in a state of bewilderment. Perhaps it is even kinder not to mention the United Kingdom, though I'm delighted to have so many British readers. Every problem in the lawly society is worse in the UK. Home building in London has collapsed.

2:40Heathrow has been making plans to build a third runway for 20 years, which is now expected to cost£20 billion. Britain's electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America's. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to have a stiff upper lip one's way through an ineffectual government. maybe it's more of a liability but you say it's not kind to mention the United Kingdom I did want to start there yes how could the United Kingdom fix itself

3:08Dan Wang:I think what the UK is really really good at just to be a little bit more kind is everything relating with the sounding clever industries by which I mean universities finance media television the Brits are the best in the world at this sort of business, don't you think? Yes. Every time I am wandering through London, and I come here maybe once or twice a year, I walk through some of the best bookstores in the world. I think that the UK has probably the best overall media environment in terms of the highest quality media environment that's available to people between things like the Financial Times and still parts of the BBC, as well as Jimmy Jobs of the future.

3:54Dan Wang:You heard it here first. So there are all sorts of really amazing intellectual assets here in the UK. And I think that people are really, really good at speaking. Just my experience of getting here on the tube, just hearing British Airways, what people say, it just makes a little bit more sense than what the Americans are capable of. And so the speaking here is really, really amazing. What's not so amazing is the ability to construct, because you can't talk a nuclear power plant into existence. You can't even talk a third runway into existence. But that's what the Brits have been trying to do, and we don't have the runway yet.

4:34Dan Wang:Where's the runway? Yeah, tell me about it. But it's not just the runway. I mean, some of the examples that you give in the book, you actually compare the New York underground system and the Parisian one, but you put the UK alongside it. It's even worse. But break down why you think that's happened. I think that the problem with essentially most Western societies is that they more or less gave up on the idea of building at various points towards the last quarter of the 20th century. So I think we can trace fairly clearly in the United States that something radically shifted in 1970. There were a whole bunch of things came together to make it much, much more difficult to build public housing, to build any sort of housing.

5:23Dan Wang:Subway construction mostly stopped by the 1970s. Maybe it's a different trajectory here in the UK. And the French have a slightly different issue. But one good thing about the French is that they have just many more homes for people with roughly the same population as the United Kingdom. And they have many more nuclear power plants, and they have much cheaper and better energy because of that. But so often when I am walking around Western societies, whether that's in Europe, North America, Canada, where I'm from, especially the Anglosphere, basically we're living through the faded infrastructure, these industrial ruins that essentially our grandparents' generation build more or less 50 to maybe 100 years ago in the case of London, or maybe 150 years ago in the case of London.

6:15Dan Wang:So I think what we really need to do is to get into a little bit of a spirit of renewal such that we are able to maintain this infrastructure because it's not super well maintained and build more because we live in a material world and we need to get much, much better at serving the material needs of the population. Why do you think the UK has suffered with this so badly? I don't spend enough time in the UK to have any firm answer, but perhaps it has something to do with this verbal cleverness that I identified at the beginning of our conversation. I thought that maybe it is not so much the lawyerly society in the UK, what I think characterizes the UK as the PPE society, where it is pretty remarkable that so many prime ministers have went to Oxford University and studied politics, philosophy, and economics.

7:13Dan Wang:This is like a giant string of all of them. And you have these amazingly erudite, learned prime ministers like Boris Johnson, who can recite, is it ancient Greek or Latin? I'm sure it is both. and Churchill off his sleeve. You know, so it is just, we have these very fun speakers. But there is some sense in which verbal cleverness, perhaps when you use humor to deflect the issue, the issues never really get solved. And it is much more these Scandi countries, Germanic countries like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Japanese, which have less of a prize of verbal dancing that they have been able to do a little bit more.

7:57Dan Wang:Now, of course, it is much more complex than whether someone can crack a really good joke. But I think that there is something of an emphasis issue here where the UK and to some extent the US prize much more verbal acrobatics rather than the shape rotation that is much more important. Have you heard the theory about how the university essay system in the United Kingdom led to Brexit? Tell me about the SA system. Well, the SA system is that most of the places in the world, you can achieve a first by arguing in favour of the status quo. But in, particularly at Oxbridge, it's prized that you have to argue against the status quo to get the first.

8:45That's what gets you there. And that was what Boris Johnson was trying to do, and Michael Gove to a certain degree with Brexit, was argue against the status quo. and that was almost the way they'd been trained.

8:56Dan Wang:That is an attractive idea where, again, there is a little bit too much, maybe you can even call it nihilistic cleverness, that the UK system seems to prize. But what we need to get to is kind of an engineering, get it done, and look at the actual state of the world, maybe get out your measuring tape and do a few measurements rather than create a few arguments. and actually start the building. Yeah, great. Well, let's talk about that for the next 45 minutes and try and sound a little bit clever. You're making me guilty for, feeling guilty for not building more. But the, I was interested, we'll get on to China, but sort of America, I hadn't appreciated actually that how many American presidents had been to law school.

9:44So it's five of the last 10.

9:46Dan Wang:Yes, and this started from the very beginning of the Republic. So if we take a look at the first 13 U.S. presidents, everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, 10 of them were lawyers of some sort. Three of them were generals. But basically, this is, I think, kind of actually the essence of the American leadership. You have a lot of lawyers. You have some national security minded people thrown in there. You know, I think Donald Trump is more of an aberration with this emphasis on business. Actually, I think there haven't been that many business people as American presidents. But that is kind of the historical origin of the United States.

10:28Dan Wang:And in the recent past, the lawyers have had kind of a run of the show, especially within the Democratic Party. So if we take a look at every presidential nominee from the Democrats between 1980 to 2024, terminating with Kamala Harris in the last election, all of them had gone to law school. And so, you know, you have this kind of really crazy dominance where, you know, it's kind of almost one profession that keeps capturing the White House. And this is, you know, if we want to play around a little bit more with this idea of verbal cleverness, then, you know, the United States has learned a little bit too much from this United Kingdom thing.

11:12Dan Wang:I thought we were happy to break apart from the king and the crown here. Unfortunately, you know, we are learning too much verbal cleverness from the Brits. And these are who we keep elevating. and so why do you think that lawyers as a because one of the things i'm fascinated by is the status of jobs we don't talk about that much here in the united kingdom and so on there's a lot kind of insinuated from different roles and so on and i think the job title is fascinating clearly law is put on a pedestal in the united states much more so why is that I think that there are many English institutions that also really prize the law.

11:57Dan Wang:And I want to say that this comes from the heritage of partly the British Isles. So as I was walking around London yesterday, I passed by the Inns of Court, the Lincolns Inn. And these are some beautiful law fields where barristers and solicitors have their, I guess, their finishing touches of training. and all the lawyers have to belong to one of these associations. Is it the Inceph Court, Inn of the Middle Temple, Inn of the Higher Temple, all these kind of crazy names out there. You have the wonderful literature by Dickens, like in Bleak House. Set around the... Set around Chancery Court, in which you have this interminable lawsuit, Charndyce and Charndyce, which is obviously Dickens' best novel.

12:45Dan Wang:and that kind of revolves around this lawsuit. We have these quotes from Shakespeare, one of the Henry ad, I believe. First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers, said by Dick the Butcher. And it's hard to know what Shakespeare is ever thinking, but I think that phrase is more sympathetic to the lawyers. So there is something about having to debate, discuss through this adversarial process, And that has carried over to the United States. And when I was writing this book, I was a fellow at the Yale Law School. And Yale Law School is a very elite law school, perhaps even slightly more elite than Harvard Law.

13:34Dan Wang:At least they like to think so, mostly because Yale Law's class size is, I think, something like one-third the size of Harvard's. And so they are a very selective bunch, much more involved in theory. And it just felt very self-consciously like the training ground to be part of the American elite. In the U.S., much more of the educational system feels like either go to Yale or you go to jail. And once you're in Yale, you've escaped the permanent underclass. Everything is going to be good. And so it becomes all the more important to have one of these positions. And it has something to do with the selection and being a magnet of all of the most ambitious people who are not necessarily very good at maths anyway, and kind of throwing them into this environment, networking such that they all know each other, leveraging this brand to go into Congress or the White House or a white shoe big law.

14:34Dan Wang:And from these advantages, it is actually pretty well self-perpetuating. Do you think America is a more meritocratic society now? Doesn't sound it from what you say there? I think relative to the United Kingdom and relative to I think anywhere in the continental Europe, I would say that the United States is still pretty meritocratic. And it is meritocratic, especially in one key respect, which is that it is able to absorb a lot of high-skilled immigrants, some of the most ambitious immigrants in the world, and sort of welcome them into the intellectual as well as the policy as well as the financial elite.

15:18Dan Wang:So I am a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley. And all around us are people who have our first generation immigrants, people who are coming predominantly from South Asia as well as East Asia and getting promoted and starting their own companies, founding their own startups, becoming the leaders of some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. And such a thing is possible in the United States. It is still pretty possible in the United Kingdom. I think that you do see quite a few immigrant tech founders who are running big companies in the United Kingdom.

16:07Dan Wang:You have some people who are not just the usual set, who have become members of parliament and the elite. And so you do see this to some extent, and I think you see this much, much less on continental Europe. But I think a lot about how the United States is still relatively the most open and the most meritocratic Western society, in part because all of these, let's say, capitalist bosses are willing to let the most talented person run a company, even though they don't have the same skin color as a lot of country club old elites. What do you think about that thought? Is the UK also pretty good at absorbing immigrants?

16:56It's pretty good at absorbing immigrants. And of course, you look at Rishi Sunak, sort of became our first South Asian prime minister. And it wasn't actually that big of a talking point when it happened, partly because it was in the midst of lots of other political chaos. But one of the things I reflect on at that time was, this is actually not that big of a deal. So I agree with it to that extent. I think social mobility-wise, we're quite good, actually, in the United Kingdom. You look at our two most recent prime ministers, Keir Starmer and Nandi Burnham. Both did not come from particularly privileged backgrounds.

17:34But I wonder if politics lends itself to that a bit more than business, perhaps, in some ways. I think the old-school networks are probably there in corporate Britain more. I think it's an interesting distinction between kind of entrepreneurs and corporate Britain, because I think entrepreneurship is much more measured in terms of your ability. How do you think us having an English literature graduate will affect Britain? I mean, I suppose it comes to that sounding clever bit again, doesn't it?

18:08Dan Wang:I think this is kind of the issue where everything is about sounding clever. In our episode that we did with him, you may know we were the first podcast to go in and interview Andy Burnham, but he broke into poetry halfway through, which I was quite impressed by. And maybe this is what we have to be a little bit more resistant of, that we cannot simply elevate people who can recite a long poetry. So I think a little bit about what counts as meritocracy. and after Imperial China went kind of off the rails, it had a little bit of this poetry-led society as well because the infamous examination system that Imperial China has been administering since essentially the Sui Dynasty, which is about 1 ,200 years ago at this point now, it eventually grew to something that was much more formalistic about writing this something called an eight-legged essay, which the formal structure was very well set.

19:15Dan Wang:And it became about memorizing just reams of ancient texts. And the conceit in the Chinese imperial system was that all of these administrators were simultaneously excellent at technocratic administration, amazing generals of war, but above all else, they're great Confucian poets and now can recite all the classical texts. And look where they ended up. So easily conquered by plenty of other countries, including the United Kingdom, or perhaps most infamously. And perhaps what we need is someone who has studied chemistry. Now, did any UK prime minister study chemistry? Oh, well, maybe I can think of at least one.

20:01Dan Wang:Let's say someone like Margaret Thatcher. And I don't know how most people think about that era. I didn't grow up in the north of the UK. Perhaps you have a certain perspective on Thatcher. But at least I think we can say in some crucial ways, Thatcher was able to get some pretty important reforms, whether or not you agree with all those reforms. Well, quite. Of course, our other most transformational prime minister was Tony Blair, who was a lawyer. So it's interesting how we've had both there. But also the leader of the Conservative Party now is an engineer, Kemi Badenow, as well. So it will be interesting.

20:35How's her poetry? Exactly. Well, let's talk a bit about China and engineering. And I was, another plug for the book Breakneck, one of the things I particularly enjoyed about it actually was that there is, you do bring forward quite a lot of Chinese history and I didn't know lots of it. And so it's a fascinating light touch read on that. It's the best book I've read for anyone who wants to understand China from every aspect. And again, I hadn't realized that all of the Politburo are engineers by background.

21:07Dan Wang:That was true. I think less true today, but at a certain point when it was at the peak in the year 2002, all nine members of the standing committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering, starting with the chief, then party general secretary, Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer. His deputy, the premier, Wen Jiabao, was trained as a geologist. You go on and on and you see all of these degrees relating to some sort of heavy industry, very Soviet form of engineering. Not all of them actually did any work as an engineer. Plenty of them simply received their degree and then started administering villages, towns, cities, provinces before they were elevated into the standing committee of the Politburo.

21:58Dan Wang:But it was a very engineering ethos. And this was a pretty explicit construction by the paramount leader, who was China's most important leader. After Mao Zedong, it was Deng Xiaoping, perhaps the Tony Blair to Margaret Thatcher. But, you know, you had this kind of an amazing run of engineers, which still persists today. And I think the difference today is that if you take a look at some of these members of the Politburo, many of them have actually run major engineering projects. So the chief of the crewed space mission, so the person delivering astronauts to the moon, he is now running one of China's biggest cities, the city of Chongqing.

22:46Dan Wang:And you have people from the weapons ministries, people from the munitions ministries, people from the aviation ministries who are administering major provinces and it is just much, much more difficult to identify something similar in the West. And why does engineering have such high status then in China? Partly, this was a creation of Deng Xiaoping, in which Deng Xiaoping took a look at the political wreckage of the Mao Zedong years after all the famines, after these crazy leftist revolutions. he decided that we need the opposite of a poet. And what is the opposite of a poet? Of course, it is an engineer.

23:35Dan Wang:So he promotes sort of the most boring people possible into the leadership, people who have minimal personalities, at least in any sort of a public setting, in which there is essentially not even any variation in hair color among all the members the politburo because they dye it all to the same shade of black so you have um you know kind of these super boring technocratic managers some of whom have actually had real engineering experience building a dam or something else and they feel like what they the way that they can really establish their legitimacy to the eyes of the population as well as to the rest of the world is to build a really giant dam and to produce a lot of electrical power.

24:23Dan Wang:And these things photograph very well. You can broadcast these images to the population. People really like them. And that's a demonstration of your prowess. And I think there is also a little bit more of this East Asian confusion, perhaps, attitude of what really matters are scoring well on tests because you want to get into the right school so you can get into the right engineering department or a law firm. And it is much easier to score well on mathematics because there is no, that's really straightforward to establish truth in mathematics, whereas trying to grade a really good essay, well, only the Oxford dons are able to do that very well.

25:10Dan Wang:And it becomes

25:14Dan Wang:who are wearing these bizarre suits and crazy bowler hats and trying to impress them really well becomes much more of a difficult challenge. So people just feel like meritocracy means scoring very well on tests and the easiest tests to score on on those in which there are much more objective results. That's interesting. And I hadn't thought so much about the modern day prowess in a world that's less dominated by war in terms of the end of the 20th century, actually the sort of infrastructure prowess and being able to use that as a status symbol across the world is really interesting sort of thought.

25:58What's the most impressive thing that China has built or perhaps the most needlessly impressive?

26:06Dan Wang:I would cite a couple of things. So there are all of these bridges in the southwestern province of Guicho where I cycled through, which is a heavily mountainous, very poor, and this very poor province has 50, five zero of the world's tallest bridges, tallest 100 bridges. So you know does a very poor province really need so many tall bridges? That is kind of a perhaps a useless demonstration of considerable prowess. The Three Gorges Dam, how important was that? It is the world's most powerful power station. It's the world's largest power station. So it has the capacity of several nuclear power plants, I believe.

26:56And you have