Highlights from Breakneck by Daniel Wang
Highlights from this book
-
A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else. When Chinese point to new cities that shimmer at night with drone displays, or metropolises connected to each other by a glistening high-speed rail network, their pride is real. Call it propaganda of the deed, but one way to impress a billion-plus people is to pour a lot of concrete.
-
The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping—heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.
-
The Biden administration was staffed by many graduates of Yale Law, who were willing to ignore the logic of the invisible hand. Instead, they roll up their sleeves to perform surgery on the American economy, one case at a time, devising a subsidy scheme for one corporation or bringing an antitrust case against another. Lawyers create so many complications that the rules governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible.
-
In the words of one 1991 paper written by a trio of economists, “Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly