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

Jimmy's Jobs of the Future

Jimmy interviews author Dan Wang about his book Breakneck, examining why Western societies like the UK and US struggle with infrastructure a

Key takeaways

• Dan Wang argues that UK leadership is dominated by PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) graduates who prioritize verbal acrobatics over practical problem-solving.
• All Democratic presidential nominees from 1980 to 2024 attended law school, highlighting a legal profession's grip on American political power.

Main topics

• Western infrastructure decline
• UK PPE and lawyerly elite culture

Notable quotes

You can't talk a nuclear power plant into existence.

Conclusion

The episode underscores the urgent need for Western societies to rebalance elite training and governance

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) 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. You'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, and it's called Breakneck. I found it a fascinating... read comparing China and America and the way that Speaker 2 (1:07) they approach their society and state. I Speaker 1 (1:09) 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. Speaker 1 (1:20) 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 this is even kinder not to mention the United Kingdom, though I'm delighted to have so many British readers. Every problem in the lawless society is worse in the UK. Home building in London has collapsed. Heathrow 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 an 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. Speaker 1 (2:04) You say it's not kind to mention the United Kingdom. I did want to start there. Yes, very good. How could the United Kingdom fix itself? Speaker 2 (2:12) 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, Speaker 1 (2:24) finance, Speaker 2 (2:25) media, television. The Brits are the best in the world at this sort of business, don't you think? Speaker 1 (2:31) Yes. Speaker 2 (2:31) 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. 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 Speaker 1 (3:37) yet. 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 kind of like 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 Speaker 2 (3:57) 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, 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. 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 built more or less 50 to maybe 100 years ago in the case of London, or maybe 150 years ago in the case of London. 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. Speaker 1 (5:39) Why do you think the UK has suffered with this so badly? Speaker 2 (5:44) 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 is the PPE society. where it is pretty remarkable that so many prime ministers have went to Oxford University and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. 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. Churchill off his sleeve. So it is just, you have these very fine 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. 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. Speaker 1 (7:20) Have you heard the theory about how the university essay system in the United Kingdom led Speaker 2 (7:27) to Brexit. Tell me about the SA system. Speaker 1 (7:30) 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 Oxbridge, it's prized that you have to argue against the status quo to get the first. That'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've been trained. Speaker 2 (7:59) 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 a 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. Speaker 1 (8:28) 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. So it's five of the last ten. Yes, and this started Speaker 2 (8:52) from the very beginning of the Republic. So if we take a look at the first 13 US 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. 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. 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. I thought we were happy to break apart from the king and the crown here. Unfortunately, we are learning too much verbal cleverness from the Brits. And these are who we keep elevating. Speaker 1 (10:27) And so why do you think that lawyers, 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? Speaker 1 (10:53) I think that there are Speaker 2 (10:54) many English institutions that also really prize the law. 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. Lincoln's in, 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. It's at the inns of court, inn of the middle temple, inn of the higher temple, these kind of crazy names out there. You have the wonderful literature by... Dickens like in Bleak House. Set Speaker 1 (11:39) around there, yeah. Set around Chancery Court in Speaker 2 (11:42) which you have this interminable lawsuit, Charndyce and Charndyce, which is obviously Dickens' best novel. And that kind of revolves around this lawsuit. We have these Speaker 1 (11:54) quotes Speaker 2 (11:54) from Shakespeare. That's one of the Henry had, 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, 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