[pear01]

That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

[adamweld]

I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.

I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.

[lukan]

"I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyer"

I can't speak for china either, so I looked it up and indeed, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and his predecessor Hu Jintao worked as a hydraulic engineer before becoming a politician.

Well in germany we had Merkel as a doctorate in quantum chemistry (but she never worked as an engineer, but neither did Xi Jinping).

I certainly would prefer politicians with some engineering background, unless they use their skills to manufacture a total state surveillance and control machine.

[sharadov]

This podcast between Tyler and Dan was a great listen - https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/dan-wang/

Dan came off as very China biased and Tyler literally schooled him on a few occasions.

But despite that, there are grains of truth in what he said, we have lawyers turned politicians at the helm in the US, so we have a great democratic system but on the flip side hardly any engineers leading us to the predicament we are in now, where nothing ever gets built.

[Gravityloss]

Bill Allen certainly got a lot of things manufactured at Boeing, despite being a lawyer

[pear01]

And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it.

Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare.

Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes.

Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.

[swsieber]

It rings true though.

I worked at a dev company, and we got bought by an IT company. Much pain and friction, all around. Is that a reductive representative of the company differences? Yeah, but it's still a useful mental model that helps one understand the differences. And I think the lawyer vs engineer trope is useful. Yeah we have both. Both my companies had both IT and developera, but the stakes & priorities were different enough that that lense became extremely helpful.

[Gud]

The USA still has a lot of high end manufacturing going on. There is no “used to”.

[embedding-shape]

Sure, but it's seemingly doing less and less. "Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP" has been going downwards for a long long time, here is the last twenty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA

[bad_haircut72]

At the end of the day the reason people see manufacturing as special is because in a war it is a strategic resource. If this wasnt the case nobody would care about "manufacturing jobs" any more than the general economy. So if you use defence production as your metric... "U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Is Consistently Over Budget and Delayed Despite Billions Invested in Industry"

https://www.gao.gov/blog/u.s.-navy-shipbuilding-consistently...

[Haven880]

You probably havnt been to Shenzhen yet. Try visit there once. You will change the text you typed here.

[callmeal]

> Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.

Think of it as engineers vs non-engineers (lawyers/mba types/etc). We complain about that on here all the time (ex. boeing). It's where the priorities are: is it on making things better or making more money? In an ideal world, it would be both. Unfortunately here, it is not otherwise enshittification would not be a thing.

[laffOr]

It feels like people accept this criticism when it props up their position - for an American (software) engineer, companies run by _American engineers_ vs companies run by American non-engineers is an obvious case of engineering is better (see criticism of Boeing); but when it's Chinese engineer vs American non-engineer, the "American" bit is more important.

[kevinqi]

just one q: have you been to china before?

[IshKebab]

It's one of those just-so stories that sounds like a nice neat explanation. You can't put the complex reality into a neat single sentence so nonsense like this is always going to win.

[cucumber3732842]

It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.

It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.

[anon7725]

> America used to build things too

Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.

The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.

Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.

Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?

[pear01]

What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.

The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.

[KaiserPro]

Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.

What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.

A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.

[almosthere]

Just about everything on NPR is I want this to be true, not this is true.

[jama211]

So you’re only attacking the title they need to use to survive on the modern internet, rather than the nuanced points they actually make?

If anyone’s analysis is subpar it’s yours.