Jousting Amid the Ruins
China is a nation governed by engineers; we’re a nation governed by lawyers. In the years from 2011 to 2013, China produced more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. China’s wealth is increasing rapidly, and by “wealth” I’m not referring to econometric measures like income, government spending and transfer payments, but rather the physical creation of new cities, housing, roads, and technological marvels.
Considered in terms of wealth you can see with your eyes, the United States is barely growing. Our highways and subways are crumbling, and even with a construction boom in New York City, China is building many, many more skyscrapers — many of them are in brand new cities.
If you think concrete and steel infrastructure is misleading, and that the US is ahead in technical progress, you’d be wrong. China is leading in the development and mass production of 5G network equipment. China will soon file more patents than we do. It graduates several times as many scientists, engineers and mathematicians. China invests more, and their best scientific universities are every bit as good as ours.
To generalize, success in China rests on making things, while in the United States success rests on taking things. It’s a generalization — no doubt there is graft and more than a few wealthy oligarchs in China got rich from shady deals, just as there are US billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who built his fortune by creating new businesses and the technical infrastructure needed to ship millions of products.
There was a time when the US was like China today. For most of the twentieth century, the US was far in front of the rest of the world in construction, building more roads, railroads, tunnels and dams than the rest of the world combined. We were the first society to urbanize at modern scales — it took less than half a century for New York to become, in 1925, the largest urban area in the world. China is now urbanizing on an even larger scale — it now has 4 cities in the 10 largest urban areas. In fact, the largest migration in human history, several times the size of the Old World to New World migration in the 19th and 20th centuries, is taking place inside China, as people move from rural areas to the cities.
Yes, the US is still growing. According to economic statistics, we’re doing quite well, and China’s growth is slowing. But our eyes do not lie — if you could study both countries from space, and measure the nighttime lights, rail movements, truck traffic, and port shipping, it would be clear that China is growing faster.
While the statistics generally show the US economy is growing, the reality is that our energies and efforts haven’t been focused on building and creating for quite some time now. In the 50s we built the interstate highway system; in the 60s we went to the moon. Since then we’ve turned inward, drawn to the new post-Christian religion of social justice and equality. Lawyers joust for large windfalls, some on the side of the injured or oppressed, others on the side of organizations protecting their wealth. Companies find a dollar spent on lobbyists has a much greater return on investment than a dollar spent on engineers. All the large political overhauls we’re managed in the past few decades — think Obamacare, gay rights, the Americans With Disabilities Act — are driven by lawyers and lobbyists, who have a vested interest in keeping the law unsettled, and thus a fertile ground for new controversies to profit from.
Adam Smith made the point that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation” meaning that a nation has deep foundations built up over the centuries, and it takes a long time to undermine the invisible supports of a prosperous society. It’s only after the collapse that you discover the evidence that rot and termites have been at work a long time.
A society that keeps its focus on building things can experience the satisfaction of teamwork: people like being part of grand endeavors. When a project is finished, they have an enduring accomplishment as a monument to their greatness, the way the sons of the Greatest Generation look back on the moon landing.
A society that focuses its efforts on justice is deluded. An unjust society cannot make itself just — the world knows no such alchemy.
It can, however, make itself poorer.
