Transcription
I didn't get that um much into the UK in my book, mostly because I haven't spent enough time here, mostly also because I didn't want to be too mean. But let me tell you, what the UK is really good at is the sounding clever um industries. The sounding clever industries include podcasting and journalism and finance and consulting and jugular. Now, when I said be nasty, I didn't mean this nasty. Jesus.
Right now, the US and I dare say the UK suffers from way too little housing construction. People don't have enough homes. That people really need new energy sources, especially clean ones. That the manufacturing base has pretty substantially rusted. There are all sorts of ways in which this doesn't feel like a robust picture of health.
Well, we're joined now by Dan Wong, um, who has written this extraordinary book. Um, Dan, thanks so much for for coming in. Um, could you just, what what made you want to write the book? I spent six years living in China when it was a time where it felt like I was witnessing a pretty extraordinary time period. So when I was living in China between 2017 to 2023, that was the time of Donald Trump's first trade war. That was a time when Chinese technology companies were shooting up in levels of ambition. That was a time when Xi Jinping grew more darkly repressive in all sorts of ways. And I, working as a technology analyst for a financial services firm, decided that we needed new ways to understand China beyond these capitalist, socialist, neoliberal terms that are pulled from the political science uh textbooks, and I wanted to have a fresh and new framework for thinking about this big country.
You talk in the book about how um, you know, obviously sort of common in the West to talk about China being communist or socialist or whatever, but actually in so many ways, you know, the uh, so many of the policies pursued by the Chinese Communist Party would be a sort of conservatives' absolute fever dream in the West.
Absolutely. This is a regime that really limits immigration, that really promotes manufacturing, where the uh political bosses really try to enforce traditional gender roles, where there's pretty minimal redistribution. This looks much more like a right-wing Ronald Reagan, uh, Thatcherite uh, country to me.
A way of sort of illustrating the kind of premise of the book um is something you talk about early on, which is this bike ride that you undertook when you were living there from Jiangxi to Chongqing, which kind of I think gave you the idea. Could you describe kind of what happened to you there and why that did plant that seed?
In 2021, I was feeling a little bit cooped up in the city of Shanghai where I was living. This was sort of the peak of the zero-COVID enforcement as well as success. And so what I decided to do was to scare up two of my friends to go on a pretty lengthy bike ride with me in the mountains of southwest China, mostly in Guizhou province. And so over five days, we cycled across Guizhou province, heavily mountainous, pretty far away from the coasts. Um, it is China's fourth poorest province. What we saw there was a level of infrastructure much more developed than California or New York, two of America's richest states. So, Guizhou province has these superb airports, it has not only the 50 tallest bridges in China, but 50 of the world's tallest bridges. And what we saw there was just, you know, the superb infrastructure, including high-speed rail that really surpasses all sorts of infrastructure in developed world levels.
Something that California has been talking about for 20 years and has, I think, built a sort of, you know, tiny number of miles of.
You're absolutely right. It's been a small section of viaducts as well as concrete and steel in a section of the desert, which is not too difficult at all. And so I think that, you know, the California high-speed rail, which is meant to connect San Francisco in the north and Los Angeles in the south, probably will not see um, any real trains running through it about three decades after the completion of the referendum that California voters uh decided to say, well, we need high-speed rail between our two biggest cities. Whereas the Chinese are absolutely building so many of these, mostly under budget and totally uh on time. And the way that um, you sort of explain this difference, which is I think the sort of novel conceptual thing about the book, is you try and explain why that is. It's well known, obviously, that China um has made extraordinary leaps in terms of its economic development, its infrastructure development, although as you say, I think because China is a relatively closed society, still, most of us in the West are probably not aware of just how sophisticated and just how advanced that infrastructure has become visibly, our own. But you explain that difference by talking about the different sort of society that the United States and actually most of our Western societies have become versus China, and you talk about China being an engineering society or an engineering state, and American society being a lawyerly society or a lawyer state.
Just explain what you mean by that. I call China an engineering state because at various points in the recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership had degrees in engineering. And this was engineering of a very Soviet sort, in which the last general secretary uh had a degree in hydraulic engineering. The present general secretary, Xi Jinping, has a degree in chemical engineering. And I think the issue with engineers is that they really like to build a lot of stuff, whether these are roads or bridges or high-speed rail throughout the vast countryside. Um, they also treat the economy as an engineering exercise. So they will try to really prompt some of the smartest kids graduating from top unis um away from working in, let's say, finance or journalism uh, or something like um, the consumer internet, into working in aviation or semiconductors or really strategic sectors.
So it's directed from that level of the Chinese state.
That's right. And they really try to reorient people's um, all of their directives. Um, and they do this in part by smacking around big tech founders like Jack Ma, or telling the finance industry, you cannot pay uh, workers more than $300,000 a year, which was a directive from Xi Jinping last year. And they're also unfortunately engineers of the human soul, which is a phrase from Stalin that Xi Jinping has repeated in the last few years, in which they can be awfully liberal-minded about treating society as a giant math exercise. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the one-child policy as well as zero-COVID, which I lived through, which the number is right there in the name. No ambiguity about what these things could possibly mean. I contrast that with the United States, which I call the lawyerly society, because so many US presidents went to law school. If we take a look at the um, early American presidents, everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, 13 of America's first 16 presidents um, had all practiced law. Five of the last 10 US presidents went to law school.
Indeed, one was a constitutional, quite respected constitutional law professor in the form of Obama.
Yes. Exactly. Um, and so when Obama lectures at the University of Chicago Law School and then becomes president, actually he's treading on a very well-trodden path. And the issue...
Two engineer presidents of the United States.
Uh, one of whom was Herbert Hoover, the other of whom was um, Jimmy Carter, both of whom are, I think, better remembered for their political failures than their um, you know, rousing successes. The issue with lawyers is that they block absolutely everything. And so, you don't have stupid ideas like the one-child policy. You also don't have functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the US. Now, if I could sneak in a word about uh, the United Kingdom, maybe the only thing stranger than the lawyerly society is the PPE society you've got over here. Isn't it very strange that all the prime ministers study PPE at uh, Oxford University, especially at Balliol College? I I find that very, very strange, how concentrated that is.
Well, as a history and politics graduate, I'll leave that to one side. Although we should return to it because I think it is an interesting distinction. But I think this is the fascinating thing. Like the idea of a lawyerly society is one where, as you say, limits are placed upon things. The opposite of China, right? Is that legal regulatory constraints um, in order to stop doing things. But the fundamental difference is, as an engineering society, the objective is to unlock how to do things. And there, that's the different direction that the two kind of models have gone in.
That's right. You cannot build a bridge or a subway line without some degree of rationalism. The bridge really has to stand. And in that case, I think you really want engineers um, to take all of the technology very, very seriously. The problem with China is that they're not all only a bunch of physical engineers. The fundamental problem with China is that they're also social engineers who treat the population as yet another building material to be torn down or remolded as they wish. I suppose the interesting thing is to consider, I mean, you're right. I mean, obviously the United States has had a long history because of its particular form of political um, evolution, has had a long history of of chief executives, of presidents who have been lawyers or at least have, you know, however briefly practiced law, which obviously China does not have, a totally different legal system and different political system. But it's true to say though, isn't it? I know you talk about this in the book. It is true to say that societies um, like the United States, indeed like the United Kingdom, they were once engineering societies in a way that's roughly comparable to China, right? I mean, you know, in the 19th century, either in the UK or in the US, I mean, you know, zoning law, planning law, virtually didn't exist. It was possible indeed, not just possible, but huge engineering advances took place, whether it was railroads or whatever it happened to be. Um, but so it's something that we've lost. It's not something that we never had.
That's absolutely right. I think that the United States was absolutely an engineering state. I date it roughly between the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. So over this um, about 100-plus year stretch, the United States built these canal systems and railway systems and highway systems, as well as these instances of the technological sublime, like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo missions that really inspired the world. And I think something really shifted throughout the 1950s and '60s in the United States when the United States absolutely overbuilt. Um, we had urban planners like Robert Moses ram big highways throughout...
It worked in the city of New York.
Yes, in the city of New York. Um, but also further uh, throughout the American countryside. The US Department of Agriculture was spraying DDT as well as other pesticides throughout the entire um, farmland. You had the Army Corps of Engineers dam essentially every river in the American West. In the United States, I think one could accurately say overbuilt. And that was a, there was a correction um, especially among law students at the time, where the uh, students at elite law schools like Harvard Law or Yale Law, where I used to be a fellow, decided that, you know what, they were most interested in doing was less the sort of creative deal-making of the sort that many lawyers were in the New Deal cabinet, working with Franklin D. Roosevelt to implement a lot of ambitious projects. A lot of lawyers' highest callings became stopping projects, stopping projects from both the government as well as corporations. And I think that this was absolutely a necessary corrective in the '60s and '70s to really stop a lot of overbuilding in the US. And I am thinking that what we have are in the in 2025 are not exactly the same problems as we had in the 1960s. Right now, the US and I dare say the UK suffers from way too little housing construction. People don't have enough homes. That people really need new energy sources, especially clean ones. That the manufacturing base has pretty substantially rusted. And I think that what we need is a new governing paradigm in which the elites embrace a little bit more construction and engineering to meet the needs of today.
So what you're saying is is that part of the problem of our malaise, because I think it's fair to say we have a malaise, particularly in in the UK, a lot of these problems are even more acute than they are in in the United States. Part of our problem in terms of sort of relative economic underperformance and a way to understand this malaise which is affecting our economics but also our politics as well, because the two are obviously interwoven, is to say that we basically have still got a kind of paradigm or conception of of politics and law which it was designed to deal with the problems of the 1960s and 1970s of overdevelopment, whereas actually we have the exact opposite problem now, which is underdevelopment, but we haven't changed our kind of legal mindset and political mindset.
That's right. I think that too many of the people who really um, were activists and changing a lot of the ground rules of of society have now aged, and they are now very substantially homeowners. They're at the top of various ladders, and they're still more interested in pulling up ladders rather than bringing the ladder down so that kids and grandchildren can have economic opportunities. That there are too many people who are citing environmental loss, which are absolutely good in many, many ways, um, but are citing environmental loss in order to stop construction because they have often some sort of vested interest in making sure that their lives are still as uh, good as they expected them to be.
Is there something um, sort of, is this a sort of continuum? I mean, that you describe as the sort of, you have a societies which have had an engineering phase and then a sort of lawyerly phase. Is that a sort of, is there something almost like teleologically logical and inevitable about that? Could China end up in a kind of lawyerly phase, or is it something that's more sort of particular to different societies and their own sort of paths of development? Do you think?
Yeah, I I love the word continuum, and I I think that the word continuum would work very well if we could slide up and down through this continuum. Unfortunately, what it looks like is that we are a little bit stuck. And I am skeptical that the um, Chinese will end up looking quite like the British or the Americans in terms of having a lawyerly society, in part because I think that there are very few Chinese emperors or Chinese uh, leaders that have had very substantial training in law. That the law is not quite so respected. That there is quite a lot less autonomy and individual freedom in China. That there is much more a sense of the practice...
Less of a concept of individual rights by comparison to the Western tradition.
That's absolutely right. That the practice of absolutism has been in place in China for hundreds of years before the European monarchs ever whiffed the idea. And so I see that the Chinese are much more interested in increasing the discretion of the state relative to the individual. And so I think that it will not really be quite ruled by lawyers. Maybe China will get stuck in some ways, but I also think that they are going to continue overbuilding in all sorts of ways.
Well, I I want to come back to that and the trade-offs with the China model, because we shouldn't pretend as if, and you don't in the book, in fairness, that, you know, the model is entirely rosy and something that we should completely emulate. But just to push back on on the idea of the lawyerly society a bit, I can completely get that. Funnily enough, and I know Britain wasn't your, you know, wasn't what you were thinking about when you're writing this. You think about the United States, but, you know, as a Brit reading this, it the lessons from it and the analysis of it, I think, are even more acute and pronounced perhaps than than the US for various reasons. I mean, I suppose with the US, from an outsider's point of view, you know, when I go to the US, I go a lot, some of the two things: one, the development which does and is taking place, particularly in certain states in the South and the Sun Belt and so on, huge data centers being built, you know, hugely new parts of of the economy emerging. Plus the fact that when we do think of technological development, engineering, I mean, the US has been responsible for so many of those advances, particularly in terms of technology and the internet since the 1990s, that we have transformed our society. So the Americans, they're not doing too badly, are they? In terms of being an engineering state still?
No, no. I think that the Americans are still doing very, very well. And I want to praise the lawyers at least in one respect, which is that um, lawyers are pretty good at protecting wealth, and I think that is an important thing.
IP and so on as well.
That's right. I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley as a fellow at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. And I think that the West Coast of America is remarkable for being the only region of the world that has not only created a company worth over a trillion dollars, but it has created several trillion companies worth over several trillions of dollars.
Got no equivalent of that in Europe.
Not at all. And so when you have, you know, these very rich companies, um, what it indicates is that the rich feel comfortable about creating big companies in America. They have the protections. Um, they have IP protections, and you know, somewhat distressingly now, I think that we're able to see that they have political um, protections if they're able to have dinner with uh, Donald Trump in the White House and falsely praise him. I think there's there's no better country in the world to be a member of the rich, because you can easily transmute that into political influence. In China, if you're a member of the rich, there's a pretty decent chance that Xi Jinping will come around and smack you uh um here and there. In Europe, one can't even build uh, very much wealth anymore. Mostly uh, most of the wealth in Europe is simply passed down through inheritance. Now, Lewis, you brought up the UK a little bit. I didn't get that um much into the UK in my book, mostly because I haven't spent enough time here, mostly also because I didn't want to be too mean. But let me uh, please.
Thank you. I have uh, I have license then to pile on. I think that this is not only the PPE society. What I've um, I've been glad to have been able to mention in the pages of the FT that what the UK is really good at is the sounding clever um industries. So, you know, these are everything that you're...
Saying this on on a political podcast, it's very much our specialty.
No, no, absolutely. And you're so good at it. So, um, you know, the sounding clever industries include podcasting and journalism and finance and consulting and...
Jugular. Now, when I said be nasty, I didn't mean this nasty. Jesus.
Well, uh, here here we go. If we can swear even a little bit, then that's that's really good. So the UK has very substantially de-industrialized, and I have not quite appreciated how high the housing costs are here and how high the energy costs are here as well. And so...
Highest in Europe, pretty much.
Highest in Europe. And my the rule of thumb is that the um, Germans have I believe something like six times as much um, greater energy costs than the Chinese do, and I think the UK is on par with that. And so there are all sorts of ways in which this doesn't feel like a robust picture of health.
No, indeed not. And when you talk about the PPE society, do you think that's different from the lawyerly society?
I think that it might be an even worse case, because um, I think that, you know, I one criticism I will absolutely concede with the lawyerly society is that this is not unique to the United States. That a lot of the difficulties with construction flow from the common law system, which is an inheritance that the Americans picked up from the British. And just just in case people don't know, this is this is the uh, this is basically, as you say, an English or British legal, particular legal system, as opposed to a sort of codified system that they tend to have in European countries. And so it is something that we've sort of bequeathed to different parts of the Anglosphere world, the US, Canada, etc.
And one way to understand the common law system is that citizens or activist groups are able to convince a judge to put a hold on a new housing development or new infrastructure development. The judges are much more empowered to do something like that. And my view now is, when it comes to building public works, never trust anyone who speaks English.
Explain why, why you think.
Well, this is the the bequest of the um, British on the entire Anglosphere, because the um, Kiwis, the Australians, the Canadians, and the Americans generally have not been very good at building. In fact, the Europeans have been much more impressive at building something like high-speed rail in Spain or subway lines in Denmark. And...
Well, again, they have a little bit more of the, I mean, it's nowhere near as much, but they have some of the tendencies that you were talking about in the Chinese system. Not so much that they have no regard for individual rights and so on, but in Brit, in British Anglosphere systems, that kind of lock, conception of of kind of rights, of property rights is so central, as opposed to, you know, most European states have a bit more history of a bit of, you know, dirigisme, right? Like, state central planning and directing, you know, the French built high-speed rail in a way that they did in the 1960s, in a way that, you know, we have never got anywhere close to, partly because the French central state dictates that it will happen, and it happens.
And the French have excellent engineers as well. Their nuclear plants are some of the best run in the world. Uh, some of their smartest people go work in the nuclear plants. And I think that this is something that I hope the British can pick up a little bit from the continent.
Um, I suppose um, in terms of looking at China though, I mean, isn't it the case that, I mean, we wouldn't want that model, would we? I mean, as much as a problem as you say that the lawyerly society might be, although as you say, as well, that can generate its own economic return, because, you know, legal stability is really important, IP that we've talked about, all of those things. There's a reason so many engineers and people want to come from China and place to work in places like the US. But nonetheless, as you say, there is something central and much darker to those extraordinary infrastructure projects that we see in China, which is a pretty wanton disregard for individual life, individual rights, and as you say today, a government which is quite happy to basically use its population as just yet another input into the machine and see what comes out at the end of it. We wouldn't want to have those that sort of attitude, would we?
No, absolutely not. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about the brutalities of the one-child policy. This is one of the the most central chapters of my book. And I don't know if an author is allowed to have a favorite chapter, but my favorite chapter was writing about the one-child policy. The scale of the brutality that the Communist Party visited upon especially the countryside. I describe it as a mostly a campaign of rural terror meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies. According to China's own statistics, this these are the official statistics released by the government. Um, China over the 35 years of the one-child policy period conducted about 320 million abortions. It sterilized about 100 million women and sterilized about 25 million men. And writing about this chapter was really examining this parade of horrors that the the party delivered. And then also thinking a little bit about um, you know, as a um, resident and a um, admirer of Shanghai, that Shanghai suffered uh, one of the most ambitious lockdowns ever attempted in the history of humanity in the year 2022, when for a period of 8 to 10 weeks, 25 million people could not leave their apartment compounds. Many people went food insecure because the engineers were so literal-minded about targeting a number, zero COVID, um, that it really didn't allow people to go outside and fend for themselves in any sort of meaningful way. And I think that it is absolutely not the case that we should adopt almost any part of the social engineering program. But I want to say that there are some things that we can not learn from China, but at least study from China, that um, and China isn't necessarily the only model here. We should study a little bit of the French development, for example, on nuclear, the Spanish development on high-speed rail, some of these Chinese developments on building um, new bridges, let's say. So let's study from the rest of the world, and let's make the West much better through pluralism.
What do you think um, which and obviously pluralism is not something that is enjoyed in China. And that is ultimately, I mean, what you're describing, I to go back to the continuum, I mean, there is a probably, there is a trade-off between pluralism, individual rights, and the ability of central states to direct economic development, right? There probably is just a trade-off there. I think clearly in your book, you're making the argument, and others make the argument as well, that that has become too weighted in in one direction, which has particular generational consequences as well. But just thinking about the China model for a moment. Do you think that there's been so much speculation over the years as to whether the Chinese are creating huge problems for themselves over the long term? Do you think that the Chinese model as it has existed will eventually come undone?
I think that there are absolutely self-limiting aspects of the Chinese model. Um, in part by thinking about something for example like the one-child policy. The Chinese felt that they had um, a crisis of overpopulation when China's population crossed over a billion people in the year 1980. And so they imposed what they thought was an elegant solution. Um, and what is uh, the problem today? Well, very many women have no desire to have children um, in part because the state has told them one child is best. And China's uh, TFR, the total fertility rate is 1.0 right now, one of the lowest in the world, far lower than Japan. And so one can cite all sorts of these instances in which the Communist Party has made pretty substantial mistakes that looked perhaps reasonable at the time um, and they have, for example, crushed the property sector, and that is one of the great problems of China's um, economic malaise right now. I think there are absolutely self-limiting aspects of China's system, and what I want to caution against is feeling like the system will collapse of its own accord in exactly the same way that the Soviet Union, for example, did. I think that China is not exactly the same as the Soviet Union. It has a much more functional economy than the Soviets ever did. It is not exactly like Japan, because I think that there is also a a more functional economy with um, you know, a much more greater focus on catching the next technological wave that the Japanese were not able to accomplish. My view is that if we take a look at only the um, you know, negative side of the ledger sheet, if we take a look only at, you know, the worst aspects of the United States or the United Kingdom, it can be a pretty ugly picture. And what we have to do is also balance that with the strengths of which the Chinese also possess quite a lot. And my view of US-China competition over the longer term is that this is something that's going to last for years and decades to come. And we shouldn't expect either the United States or China to collapse. That either system will simply dissolve. The country that's ahead, I think, will make mistakes of hubris as well as overconfidence, much as he did by smacking around entrepreneurs or having this controlled demolition of the property sector. The country that's behind will feel the crack of the whip really to try to reform. So I think that this is going to be a dynamic race over the longer run.
Do you think is ahead right now?
Very hard to say. I think that um, you know, coming to you from the United States, I would not say that President Donald Trump has covered the country in glory. That there are all sorts of um, problems right now um, that are completely self-inflicted, I think, by Donald Trump. There's economic problems, um, there's um, the tariff issue, cost of living issues. He has completely blown up the diplomatic goodwill um, that many people feel have felt disposed well disposed towards the United States.
This war against American higher education institutions, which have been the motor of American economic dynamism for a long time.
Speaking to you as a scholar at Stanford University, I don't like feeling um, quite uh, attacked um, in a in a general way by Donald Trump. And so, you know, there is this odd retribution that Donald Trump is visiting against his political enemies. There's all sorts of issues with rule of law, you know, flagrant corruption.
Well, I was going to say, I mean, on that, I mean, is Trump, I mean, not in a way that you, I'm sure, would approve of. Is Trump moving America away from the lawyerly society in the sense that we have an administration and at least for now, a Congress and a uh, judicial branch which is relatively unwilling to impede his power, which compared to most American administrations has been pretty disregarding of the rule of law in all sorts of ways? I mean, is he moving America away from the lawyerly society?
No, I would not say so. Uh, first of all, I would say that Donald Trump is fundamentally a product of the lawyerly society. We cannot understand uh, Donald Trump's business career without seeing how central lawsuits are. This man has sued absolutely everyone. He has sued his former business partners. He has sued his political opponents. Is he suing the BBC yet? I'm not sure if that has threatened to, but curiously enough, uh, it hasn't materialized as yet.
Well, maybe after this interview, we'll see that case in court.
Maybe he'll sue us.
Yes, indeed. So um, and there is a way in which Donald Trump is very lawyerly in terms of intimidating people, flinging accusations left and right, and trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion. And so, and there was a time, I think there was a flicker of a moment um, when we might have thought that Elon Musk and Doge could have brought some engineering ethos into the US government. Unfortunately, uh, Elon himself has gone uh, kind of crazy himself. I think that is generally acknowledged. Um, and uh, Elon was quickly fired as co-president uh, six minutes after his tenure. And so I think that there might have been a flicker of a moment in which Donald Trump really did sort of try to do the sort of reforms that would be necessary to move the United States forward. I also think that Donald Trump is a product of the lawyerly society in another way, that too many people have not felt that their lives have gotten substantially better, that manufacturing losses have been very substantial, cost of living has really gotten up, especially in housing. And I think that when the economics aren't really good, people turn towards uh, populist politicians like Donald Trump, as well as maybe others we can name in the UK, as well as Europe. And I'm not really sure that these populist solutions will really meet the needs of the moment.
But indeed, as well, so often more liberal political forces have tended to intellectually and conceptually seem unable to break free, yes, of the kind of intellectual shackles of the period that that you're talking about, of this sort of long period from the 1960s and '70s to save the system from itself against these populist forces.
Something I'm optimistic for, because I'm always a sunny optimist from California, uh, is that, you know, the United States will be able to have some form of reform. That I think that there is a need um, among especially the Democratic party to be less loyal. The Democratic party is far more loyal because it is possible. Of course, again, I mean, because this is, you know, we haven't seen this blow out before. Let's assume your conception is right. We are anchored in this kind of lawyerly society. Obviously, the very fact of that presumably makes it very difficult to reform the system, because actually what you require, it's a sort of slight catch-22, which is you need to break the system, and in order to break the system, or at least substantially reform it, you need to break out of that kind of lawyerly kind of black hole that you're stuck in. So, is it actually possible? Well, Donald Trump is breaking parts of the system, and we need to put it back together again, and accept in a much better way. I think that there is much of a um, conversation among the Democratic party of, you know, how do we actually build more housing? How do we actually build more clean energy? And that is represented very well by the book "Abundance." And I think that there is Ezra Klein, as well as uh, Derek Thompson. And I think that there is also much more energy within the Democratic party to think about how to properly do industrial policy, how to, you know, build a lot more manufacturing jobs, how to build a lot more clean energy. And in some sense, I I still feel that, you know, Donald Trump is always the wrong answer, but he often asks good questions. And once you break a lot of things, you know, the the one thing that I'll say um um to to be kind to Donald Trump and to get this lawsuit off our backs um is to say that Donald Trump is disruptive, and often often it changes, shakes out in bad ways, but one could always hope that it shakes out in a better way this time.
Our lawyers will take note. Um, if you had to, let's talk not just about the US, but the UK as well here. um, practically speaking, to break out of this malaise, to break out of the lawyerly society, what do we have to do?
Well, my big hope is that as the um, UK as well as the US, let's say um, do simple progrowth things like build a little bit more housing in um, places that need a little bit more housing. More young people will move in, more businesses will move in. The neighbors will feel that, oh, isn't it kind of nice to see a few more baby strollers on our street, to have a few more bookstores or bakeries on our street, and that triggers a little bit of a positive cascade of being excited for growth. And I think that this excitement for growth is something that China as well as the United States really share. That you don't really need to convince the people or the elites that growth is good. Whereas here, what I what I find in uh, the uh, Europe as well as the UK, is that it's a little bit tougher sledding to you know, really try to convince people that growth is good. They kind of view it as abstract. They they sort of fear it. There's maybe 10 to 20% of the population that really believe in degrowth, which I find a very strange um ideology.
Well, I think one of the things that you don't get in the US, but you definitely get, and I've I've got this a lot from different politicians in certainly on that part of the spectrum, is if you start talking about growth, the instant thing, and I can understand it, but it's interesting, the instant thing that you get is to say, well, growth for whom, you know, i.e., what's the point in having growth if the top 1% are taking it all?
Well, let's have growth for everyone. And then the I think that has to be the response. That we have growth much more for let's say the um, you know, bottom few quintiles of um, of of society. That I think what we can achieve is growth for all. That what uh, many people need are more houses, better mass transit, um, better jobs. Um, and so I don't think that, you know, we should necessarily preclude that growth is something that can only exist for the top 1%. And I think that, you know, if we are able to have a few of these positive flywheel effects and to have, you know, lower energy costs, lower housing costs, I think that people will demand more of it. And something that I think that the Americans and the Chinese are are both really good at is that the governments have this raw craving for geopolitical power that they really wear on their sleeves. And I think for the most part, that is making the country more sovereign and more autonomous in various crucial ways. The uh, American entrepreneurs and Chinese entrepreneurs really care about making donuts. You know, they want to hustle. They care about the money. Whereas here in um, the UK and Europe, it just becomes really, really difficult for people to imagine building really big businesses at all. I'm still often struck that what's really holding up the European equity markets are Asian consumers buying French handbags. That doesn't sound very sustainable to me.
Do you when you come to Europe, come to the UK, do you get the sense of a realized sense of what some people talk about now, which is a museum continent, continent just out of the race?
Oh, well, I find that way too nice. I in my opening pages, I call Europe a mausoleum economy. And so, you know, it is very beautiful, but feels quite stagnant and dead. And I do spend quite a bit of time in Europe. My my wife is Austrian, and over the summer, we spent quite a bit of time in Denmark, which is one of the great economic successes of the EU so far, mostly because of Novo Nordisk. But it just happened to be the case that while we were living in Copenhagen over the summer, I cracked open the newspaper and I saw that Novo Nordisk's share price fell by about 30%. They had to fire the CEO in part because of competition from the American side of Eli Lilly. And what I really, really worry about with Europe is that, you know, on the one hand, they are their uh, top firms are not quite as competitive as American firms in biotech and financial services, in software, as well as AI. And on the other hand, they're clearly being de-industrialized by the Chinese right now. That the Germans, especially, are losing a lot of their automotive and industrial expertise to the Chinese. And so when you have, when you're sort of being squeezed on both sides, I think that, you know, as the economy weakens, I suspect the politics will not get better. And if these populist uh, parties all win, I I'm a little bit skeptical that they will be able to deliver all of these solutions that make the economy more competitive and more growth-friendly.
As you say, what's extraordinary about it, and we've got that exact malaise in Britain as well, and in the EU, the kind of lack of urgency that there is.
People here don't want to make donuts. What's what's up with that?
Um, just finally, do you think there is a lot of speculation about, and obviously there's been much analysis about whether, you know, the US and China are destined for conflict? I mean, clearly they're in the midst of some economic conflict right now. You talk in the book actually, and you've alluded to it there, about how similar the two countries are in a weird way, in terms of the public and public attitudes in a way that is not commonly appreciated.
Do you think that they're destined for conflict? No, I don't think that it is inevitable, but um, you know, this is something that I hope that all of us spend a little bit of time thinking about to prevent the next great conflagration in the world. World War I caused several million deaths. World War II caused several tens of millions of deaths. And we really don't want to get into the next order of magnitude in anything like World War II. And what I'm really hopeful for is that people become a little bit more curious about everyone else. I think that especially writing as a Canadian, um, spending most my time in the United States, I very clearly choose the United States because I prize pluralism, because I prize freedom of speech, I prize the ability to buy books when I when I can. Um, what I'm really trying to do is to write for, you know, people living in, let's say, a a lawyer in Indiana, or someone living in, let's say, rural Sussex, uh, in the UK, to many of these people will never actually visit China. And what I'm really hopeful is that people can be at least a little bit more curious about what is going right in China, what is desperately going wrong. And I think that the Chinese should absolutely also be more curious about Europe as well as um, the United States. And I think that if we're all adopting an attitude of mutual curiosity, that's the best way to keep us all out of trouble.
Well, we may um, be good at sort of sounding clever, but we're even better at sounding curious. The best at it. Hey, at least we've got a growth industry down there. Indeed. Thank you so much for...
Thank you very much.
The News Agents. This is a Global Player original podcast.