How FDA Drama Is Roiling Biotech Stocks
The Food and Drug Administration isn't typically this dramatic. But the controversial appointment, whipsaw resignation, and surprise return of a drug industry provocateur is turning President Donald Trump's FDA into an unknowable quantity in American public health. And that uncertainty has reverberated onto Wall Street, where unpredictability isn't warmly received.
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Bloomberg
a few seconds ago
- Bloomberg
Don't Expect Trump to Put Ukraine or Europe Above Himself
Soon after Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska last Friday to discuss how he might end his invasion of Ukraine, President Donald Trump ushered the Russian leader into the back of his armored limousine, known as 'the Beast.' The pair rode alone together for about 10 minutes before reaching a conference room where their formal meeting was to take place. Putin speaks passable English, and there were no interpreters in the car. No other aides or officials were with them either, and thus far there is no public record of what they chatted about.
Vox
a few seconds ago
- Vox
A dangerous new idea about what Democrats are doing wrong
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. Polling is '90% bullshit.' In fact, all political data is 'garbage.' The Democratic consultants who traffic in such numbers are perpetrating a 'scam' against their own party and are largely responsible for President Donald Trump's victories. Instead of trying to gauge public opinion through pseudo-scientific surveys, Democrats should mostly just read history and the classics. This is the gist of John Ganz's recent column, 'Against Polling' — a widely-shared polemic that actually earned plaudits from some Democratic pollsters. Both this piece and its reception are puzzling. Ganz is a brilliant writer with many insightful things to say about history and political philosophy. (I recommend subscribing to his newsletter and buying his book.) Yet his diatribe against 'data' is unfair and unpersuasive. He patently mischaracterizes the positions he's arguing against and provides little evidence for his own. He does not acknowledge some obvious objections to his anti-empiricism, let alone rebut them. His piece's valid assertions are uncontested while its contentious ones are unvalidated. Nevertheless, it was warmly received, even by some whose vocations it disparaged. I'm not certain why this is. But I fear that Ganz's argument is appealing for the very reason it undermines clear-eyed thinking about electoral politics: it offers an elaborate rationalization for dismissing any data one does not like. This story was first featured in The Rebuild. Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Ganz makes some valid points (that no one actually disputes) Ganz's critique is aimed at both political data in general, and a specific set of ideas about Democratic electoral strategy: Principally, the notion that Democratic candidates should seek to increase the salience of their popular positions, avoid talking much about their unpopular ones, and give greater deference to public opinion than the party presently does. This basic outlook is often described as 'popularism' (a hideous but useful neologism). And it is championed by, among others, the Democratic data scientist David Shor, the commentator Matt Yglesias, and less prominently (and more equivocally) myself. In prosecuting his case against popularism, Ganz says many things that are inarguably true. For example — after spending the bulk of his column arguing that public opinion data is 'garbage' and '90% bullshit' — he retreats to the claim that polling is 'part of getting a picture of the world,' just 'not the entirety of it.' Needless to say, the idea that polling shouldn't be your only tool for discerning reality and the idea that polling is almost entirely fraudulent are pretty different. The first claim is indisputable; the trouble is that no one disputes it. This is the problem with virtually all of Ganz's valid assertions. He correctly observes that polling is flawed, that public opinion isn't fixed, that not all useful knowledge about politics is quantifiable, and that there is more to good campaigning than mirroring the public's policy preferences. But he does not quote a single Democratic consultant or commentator who rejects these truisms, likely because none do. Instead of refuting the popularists' actual ideas, Ganz rebuts an absurd ideology of his own invention. He writes that 'the worldview of the data guys is based on a giant mistake' — namely, that 'there's an objective world out there, and it doesn't change.' Yet no serious person has ever claimed that public opinion doesn't change. It obviously does. And this is not lost on the 'data guys.' David Shor, to take one example, has argued that Democratic politicians have the power to reshape many of their base voters' views, that the Dobbs decision made Americans more liberal on abortion, and that 'what people care about and trust [the Democrats] on really is responsive to concrete events that happen in the world.' On this point, the actual dispute between Ganz and the popularists is not about whether public opinion can change, but about how much scope Democratic politicians have to reshape the views of swing voters — which is to say, voters who do not particularly trust Democratic politicians. Everyone recognizes that this scope is limited. Most progressives would doubtlessly agree that Democrats can't persuade swing voters to support large new taxes on meat. There may be a strong moral case for making steak more expensive, given the cruelty and ecological harms inherent to large-scale animal agriculture. Were Democrats to campaign on the case for making meat less affordable, however, they would surely do less to change swing voters' views on factory farming than to poison the Democratic Party's image. I seriously doubt that Ganz would contest this. Assuming he doesn't, then the debate on this point isn't about whether Democrats must acquiesce to the public's existing preferences on some subjects. Rather, it is about 1) what those subjects are and 2) how they can be identified. These are difficult questions. To answer them, one must make not only empirical judgments but normative ones (chiefly, about how Democratic politicians should weigh the risk of alienating voters against the benefits of evangelizing for worthy causes). It is reasonable to argue that Shor, Yglesias, or any other 'data guy' gets these questions wrong. But demonstrating that requires engaging with their actual premises, not shredding a caricature of their worldview. Related 5 reasons Democrats are in good shape Did Democratic pollsters misjudge the politics of immigration? Ganz comes closest to addressing the data guys' actual views in his discussion of immigration. In 2024 — and during the early months of Trump's presidency — popularists encouraged Democrats to focus on the electorate's economic concerns, rather than emphasizing the moral case against Trump's mass deportation plan. Ganz argues that this was a mistake, one rooted in an overvaluation of polling data and an underestimation of the electorate's moral judgment. His argument is as follows: Polling in 2024 indicated that voters agreed with Trump about mass deportation. This led the popularists to discourage Democrats from attacking the cruelty of Trump's vision. But surveys on this subject were fundamentally misleading: Most voters did not harbor any deep commitment to purging the country of hardworking, law-abiding immigrants. And once people actually saw what Trump's policy entailed, they recoiled in horror. Now, a majority of Americans disapprove of the president's handling of immigration. In Ganz's view, we should not blame the public for failing to anticipate the consequences of Trump's agenda, but rather, the 'lazy politicians' and 'craven advisers' who prevented Democrats from alerting voters to those harms. By refusing to appeal to the electorate's 'faculties of judgement and imagination,' Ganz suggests that the 'data guys' abetted Trump's election. There are many problems with this argument. But most derive from two unsound assumptions at the core of Ganz's reasoning: • If voters soured on Trump's immigration agenda after witnessing its effects in 2025, then Democrats could have changed their minds about that agenda in 2024, had the party only helped Americans picture those effects. • If voters disapprove of Trump's handling of immigration, then the Democratic Party must not have any interest in reducing that subject's salience relative to economic issues. On the first point, it simply isn't true that Democrats failed to warn voters about what mass deportation would entail. To the contrary, on the campaign trail last September, then-Vice President Kamala Harris explicitly appealed to voters' 'faculties of judgement and imagination' on this subject, warning that Trump had 'pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history. Imagine what that would look like and what that would be? How's that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps?' At the time of these remarks, Democrats had been making versions of this argument for nearly a decade. At one point during that period, Trump had used presidential power to separate migrant parents from their children, in a notorious scandal. If all this wasn't enough to persuade swing voters that Trump's approach to immigration was intolerably cruel, why should we be confident that Harris could have convinced them of as much, if only she'd made the case more forcefully? Ganz offers evidence that public opinion on immigration is sensitive to shifts in objective conditions and media coverage. But it doesn't follow that such opinion is highly responsive to Democratic rhetoric. Yet there is a more basic problem with Ganz's case: Current polling still indicates that immigration is a source of relative strength for Trump and weakness for the Democratic Party. In RealClearPolitics's polling average, immigration remains Trump's best issue, with voters disapproving of the president's handling of that subject by only 5 percentage points as of August 15. By contrast, voters disapprove of Trump's management of inflation by 20.5 points, and of the economy more broadly by 11.6 points as of the same time. More critically, some recent polling indicates that voters still prefer Trump's cruel brand of immigration enforcement to the Democratic Party's perceived laxity on the issue. In a July Wall Street Journal poll, voters said that they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle immigration by a 17-point margin. On illegal immigration, meanwhile, voters favored the GOP by 24 points. Therefore, the popularists' basic proposition on this subject — that Democrats have an interest in emphasizing economic issues over immigration — is as plausible today as it was in 2024. To be clear, none of this necessarily means that Democrats shouldn't spotlight the cruelty of Trump's immigration policies, for non-electoral reasons. In my own view, the popularists can get monomaniacally fixated on political optimization, at the expense of other considerations. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen's decision to agitate for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant whom Trump unlawfully deported to El Salvador — may or may not have marginally increased the Democrats' odds of winning the 2026 midterms. But doing so brought comfort to a longtime US resident who was suffering in a nightmarish foreign prison. That seems worthwhile. Yet Ganz does not frame his case against popularism in purely moral terms. Rather, he asserts that the 'data guys' are specifically wrong about how to win elections — so wrong that their polling amounts to 'garbage' and a 'scam.' His only evidence for this extremely strong claim is that public opinion about immigration has changed since 2024. In other words, Ganz is guilty of precisely what he accuses the 'data guys' of doing: drawing sweeping conclusions on the basis of a myopic and incurious reading of cherry-picked polling data. Related This is why Kamala Harris really lost If empiricism is dead, then everything is permitted It is easy to enumerate the liabilities of polling and election data analysis. The real difficulty lies in naming alternative methods for ascertaining political reality that are more reliable and less vulnerable to motivated reasoning. And Ganz fails to meet that challenge. He argues that politics is an art — not a science — and can therefore only be mastered through humanistic methods: There is no alternative to studying 'the words and actions of politicians past' and the vast philosophical literature on effective rhetoric, beginning with the ancient Greeks. FDR's oratory may not offer the precise guidance of polling, message tests, or elaborate statistical analyses of election results. But Ganz argues that such number crunching can obscure more than it reveals by abstracting away essential context, which can only be captured through a qualitative examination of political history and the classics. It's surely true that some useful political knowledge can't be represented mathematically, and that history is an indispensable supplement to political science. Yet as a tool for anticipating how voters will respond to a given agenda or message, the humanistic study of 'politicians past' has obvious flaws. For one thing, as Ganz himself emphasizes, public opinion changes over time. Rhetorical tactics and substantive positions that worked in the past may therefore have less purchase in the present. Polling can offer a portrait of contemporary attitudes; history can't. Further, what history and the classics tell us about optimal electoral strategy in 2025 is extremely indeterminate: By focusing on distinct historical examples or emphasizing different pieces of context, one can draw an enormous variety of different conclusions. Of course, one can apply quantitative tools in biased ways. But scientific methods impose far greater constraints on motivated reasoning than humanistic inquiry does. Rigorous polling can falsify one's assumptions about public opinion (or at least, cast them into doubt). Analyses of which candidates have outperformed their party in recent elections can validate or undermine certain theories of political best practice. By contrast, no one has ever learned that their policy preferences were unpopular by reading Aristotle. Ganz's piece unintentionally illustrates his method's susceptibility to biased reasoning. To appreciate how, it's worth quoting his conclusion at length: The statistical fixation of the early 21st century that's made so many bad predictions and fathered so many puzzling defeats must be abandoned. We are not in an era of small calculations but of great movements. Politicians with a vision and a strong, clear rhetorical appeal, like Trump, Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani, are those who excite people. People become disappointed and disillusioned when they lapse into focus-group-tested canting. Say something for a change. It's difficult to say exactly what Ganz is asserting here, since his language is a bit vague and aphoristic. If you squint, you could read him as merely asserting a bunch of truisms (it is bad for a politician to speak in canned lines that sound inauthentic; charisma matters; having an energized base is desirable, all else equal). In the most straightforward reading, though, Ganz appears to be making at least three contentious propositions: • Democrats' recent defeats were caused by excessive deference to public opinion data. • Trump's success demonstrates that paying close heed to polling is less important than offering a vision that excites people and mobilizes a 'great movement.' • For a model of the type of Democratic politics that works in our era, one should look to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. None of these claims are self-evidently true. On the first point, one could just as easily assert that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost because they paid too little attention to opinion polling, rather than too much. After all, both declined to embrace many majoritarian positions that contradicted progressive principles. And Harris famously ignored the counsel of data-driven Democratic consultants, who had implored her to focus less on 'democracy' and more on the cost of living. Similarly, it's not obvious that Trump has been more successful than a less charismatic, but more moderate and disciplined, Republican would have been in his place. It's worth remembering that Trump 1) lost the popular vote by 2 million ballots in 2016, despite running against a historically disliked Democratic nominee, 2) lost the presidency in 2020, despite running against a senescent man who could not reliably speak in coherent sentences, 3) won narrowly in 2024, even with the tailwind of a global anti-incumbent backlash, and 4) through it all, has had an unusually low approval rating (for a president or party leader). It is entirely possible that Republicans would have done much worse over the past nine years, had they been led by a straitlaced moderate with poorly attended rallies. But how does Ganz know that? Finally, it's difficult to see a firm basis for selecting Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani as exemplars of effective Democratic politics in 2025. All are gifted politicians. And I think there are things that the broader Democratic Party can learn from each. Yet they have collectively won zero general elections outside of New York City and Vermont — two of the most Democratic jurisdictions in America. And Mamdani has a negative 9 percent favorability rating in New York state, according to a Siena College poll released this week. The challenge facing Democrats today is not how to win a New York City mayoral election, but how to win presidential races in Pennsylvania and Senate contests in North Carolina. And Ganz offers no evidence that appealing to majoritarian opinion in those places (as measured through scientific methods) is less important than exciting 'great movements,' in the manner that Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani have. All of which is to say: By dismissing 'scientific' methods of evaluating claims about political reality, Ganz enables himself to draw strong conclusions about how Democrats can best disempower the GOP — without providing much in the way of substantiation or even argument. And those conclusions happen to be ideologically convenient for Ganz, whose social democratic politics are well-represented by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani. This is what I find insidious about his whole argument: It serves to insulate progressives' intuitions about electoral politics from any empirical challenge. Progressives have strong incentives to engage in wishful thinking about electoral politics This is a problem, not least because the left's political intuitions are liable to be biased, unless disciplined by data. Left-wing activists and public intellectuals have strong incentives to believe that there are minimal tensions between the progressive movement's factional project (to pull Democrats leftward) and the Democratic Party's electoral one (to disempower the Republican Party). If there were large trade-offs between these two endeavors, then such progressives might have a moral obligation to counsel some form of moderation. After all, as the Trump administration demonstrates on a near-daily basis, the stakes of keeping the authoritarian right out of power are extremely high. Yet one cannot advocate for a more ideologically cautious Democratic Party without risking estrangement from other progressives. In principle, there is no reason why it couldn't be true that social democracy is the most just political system and that — at this particular point in history — the Democratic Party would win many more elections if it moderated on some issues. The latter is an empirical judgment, not a normative one. Yet to articulate this view as a progressive is to jeopardize your sense of belonging and esteem among those who share your moral commitments. Doing so is sure to get you derisively branded as a 'centrist.' Some progressive writers may even feel comfortable calling you a 'craven' scammer without evidence. Thus, anyone who finds community and identity in progressive politics — a group that includes a large share of Democratic operatives, staffers, and commentators — is liable to err on the side of underestimating the political utility of moderation. Polling and election data are the only real checks on such a bias. And Ganz's piece provides a rationalization for dismissing them. None of this is to say that the popularists are necessarily right about how Democrats can win elections, much less about how the party should balance the dictates of principle against those of political expediency. The latter is an inescapably value-laden question, which data cannot resolve. Yet you can't formulate a morally serious answer to that dilemma without a plausible conception of political reality. And scientific methods remain our best tools for forming such a conception. For all of polling's flaws, there is still no better way to find out what voters think than to ask them (or more specifically, a representative sample of them, using maximally neutral question wordings). And for all the methodological disputes among political scientists, there is still no better way to discern which types of candidates most voters favor than to rigorously examine whom they elect.
Atlantic
a few seconds ago
- Atlantic
While China Builds, America Litigates
After Donald Trump announced ruinously high tariffs on China in the spring, a simple reminder of that country's growing technological power forced him to back down. Shortly after Trump's April 2 tariff announcement, Beijing abruptly suspended exports of rare-earth magnets. Automakers around the world panicked. These magnets—manufactured in Chinese factories from crucial metals extracted mostly from Chinese mines—have become essential for building cars. Ford Motor paused production at a plant in Chicago. Automotive-lobbying organizations in the United States and Europe warned that car companies were weeks away from halting production. A few reportedly were considering moving some production to China in order to maintain access to supplies. On May 12, the White House agreed to lower tariff rates for China before it had announced trade deals with Europe, Canada, Japan, or other allied countries. China produces 90 percent of the global supply of rare-earth magnets, which are not the only products that Beijing can deny the rest of the world. Decades of industrial policy and fierce entrepreneurialism have created the world's mightiest manufacturing machine. Chinese firms are also dominant producers of many pharmaceutical ingredients (especially for antibiotics and ibuprofen), battery materials, and entire categories of electronics components—not to mention smartphones, household appliances, toys, and other finished goods that American consumers want. In cutting off rare-earth magnets, officials in Beijing flexed but one finger. If they wanted, they could have strangled vital sectors of the American economy. How did America lose so much productive capacity to China and end up in such a vulnerable position? Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism—levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime—while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants. Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the ideological mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China's government from the 1980s onward. By 2002, all nine members of the politburo's standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, China's most prominent science institution. At the start of his third term, in 2022, Xi filled the politburo with executives who had experience in aerospace and weapons. Huge bursts of construction define today's China. A person born in 1993—when the country built its first modern expressway—was able, when she reached the legal driving age 18 years later, to motor across a network of highways that surpassed the length of America's interstate system. As part of China's economic transformation, officials in Beijing have directed the construction of high bridges, large dams, enormous power plants, and entire new cities. The corporate sector, abetted by government policies that encourage manufacturing, is fixated on production too. A rough rule of thumb is that China produces a third of the world's manufacturing, including essential products such as structural steel and container ships. Derek Thompson: The disturbing rise of MAGA Maoism The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. More than half of U.S. presidents practiced law at some point in their career. About half of current U.S. senators have a law degree. Only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a Navy submarine. (Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.) Lawyerly instincts suffused Joe Biden's economic policy, which brushed aside the invisible hand in favor of performing surgery on the economy—a subsidy scheme for one corporation, an antitrust case against another. Biden hoped to reindustrialize America via landmark bills such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, but his administration's legalistic commitments repeatedly tripped up the pace of construction. Executive agencies were so obsessed with designing rules for how to do things that little ended up being built. Efforts to connect rural areas to broadband or create a network of electric-vehicle-charging stations barely broke ground before voters reelected Donald Trump. Trump is not a lawyer, but he—like many wealthy Americans—is no stranger to using the courtroom to get what he wants. His business career and his presidency have been rife with lawsuits: against business partners, political opponents, news outlets, and sometimes his own lawyers. Trump's governing style has a litigious air to it too: flinging accusations left and right, intimidating people into dropping their opposition, besmirching people in the court of public opinion. Where Biden was plodding and proceduralist, Trump is naturally inclined toward bare-knuckle lawfare. The lawyerly society has some important advantages. You can't build companies worth trillions without the rule of law to set up an environment where the rich feel safe to invest. The U.S. remains home to most of the world's most valuable companies, in part because lawyers protect their right to profit off of their intellectual property. But the fact that wealthy companies and individuals can easily assert their interests in court is hardly a guarantee of broad economic progress for a society. The United States has made the geopolitical mistake of bringing lawyers to a showdown with China on trade and technology. The first Trump administration levied an initial round of tariffs on Chinese goods and added scores of Chinese tech companies to trade blacklists. The Biden administration refined technology-export controls, designing exquisite webs to ensnare Chinese chipmakers, telecommunications firms, and any company hoping to deploy AI. Xi Jinping, meanwhile, surrounded himself with scientists and engineers. Xi grew up in a China whose Communist Party leaders nursed grievances about imperialist incursions. They understood the Soviet Union to have become strong and modern through heavy industry. China unveiled its first Five-Year Plan in 1953, the year that Xi was born. In the fall of this year, Xi will put the finishing touches on the 15th Five-Year Plan. Thomas Wright: Trump wasted no time derailing his own AI plan In the intervening years, ceaseless construction has helped reinforce the Communist Party's political resilience. Building so many homes, bridges, and power plants means that the material benefits for most of China's population are widely spread. Chinese citizens have seen their conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past 40 years. The steady improvement of parks and subway networks makes urban residents expect that the future will be even better. When Chinese people point to new cities that shimmer at night with drone displays, or metropolises connected to one another by a glistening high-speed-rail network, they show genuine pride, in my experience. One way to impress 1 billion–plus people is to pour a lot of concrete. China has also turned itself into an energy superpower. Two decades ago, it produced about half of the electricity that the United States did. Today, it generates twice as much. Beijing is simultaneously attempting to wean itself off oil imports while leading the world in an 'all of the above' energy strategy that includes coal, nuclear, and wind plants, plus astounding amounts of new solar capacity. Beijing recently announced the construction of the Yarlung Tsangpo dam, which will use 60 times more cement than the Hoover Dam and will dwarf the already gigantic Three Gorges Dam. By the end of this year, more than half of the cars sold in China today will be electric—again the product of forceful policy. The engineering state is effective at making military goods too. China produces about 80 percent of the world's consumer drones, which can easily be adapted for the battlefield. China has approximately 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States; according to the General Accounting Office, many classes of U.S. Navy ships are delayed by up to three years. Last December, then–National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience 'exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly' if it were ever to face the Chinese military. America has lost the productive capacity to sustain a major war. American manufacturing output has never recovered to its highs from 2008; the manufacturing workforce has shrunk by a million people since then. The United States has lost the ability to get stuff done as it focuses on procedures rather than results. In 2008, residents of California—the crucible of the American modern economy—voted to fund a high-speed-rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That same year, China began construction of its high-speed-rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. China's line opened in 2011 at a cost of $33 billion. In its first decade of operation, it completed more than 1.3 billion passenger trips. Seventeen years after the ballot proposition, California has built a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which is close to San Francisco or L.A. The latest estimate for California's rail line is $135 billion. The first segment of California's train will start operating, according to official estimates, between 2030 and 2033. That's a margin of error of three years—the same length of time that China needed to build the entire Beijing–Shanghai line. Even far smaller projects—a public bathroom, a bus-stop sun shelter —turn out underwhelming, embarrassingly late, or over budget. Americans today live in the ruins of an industrial civilization where the remaining infrastructure is barely maintained and rarely expanded. The result is a deep sense that nothing is working. The United States wasn't always like this. It once had the musculature of an engineering state, where lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and rockets to the moon were built. When the United States had surging population and economic growth through the 19th century, political elites agreed that its wide territories needed canals, rails, and highways. America's construction boom slowed down after the 1960s. Patrick George: The American car industry can't go on like this What happened then? The American public revolted against environmental harms, the highways then being rammed through urban neighborhoods, and industry regulators who were cozy with big companies. The legal profession started to change. Before the '60s, prominent lawyers filed into government to enact programs such as FDR's New Deal. Afterward, idealistic law students followed in the footsteps of the young Ralph Nader, who campaigned to be a watchdog of alleged government abuses. 'Sue the bastards,' a slogan of that era declared, urging environmentalists and other activists to take government agencies to court. A righteous impulse from that era has convinced many Americans that physical dynamism is undesirable and has robbed society of its ability to improve itself. Rather than expanding new subway systems, building nuclear-energy plants or rare-earths-processing facilities, or designing the path for a new transmission line, many of the country's smartest engineers have been seduced by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where they can have more fun and make a lot more money. I am not suggesting that the United States copy China's approach. The engineering state's spectacular successes have come at staggering costs. Beijing treats its citizens as yet another building material and Chinese society as something to be engineered too. Officials have restricted ethno-religious minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang from practicing their religion and perpetuating their cultures. Only the engineering state could have pursued the one-child policy, which was ultimately a campaign of rural terror enforced through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. China's efforts to engineer the economy—which have produced slumping real-estate values and a collapse in corporate valuations—have frightened entrepreneurs and their investors. Beijing's efforts to engineer society have made many young people feel adrift, with a substantial portion desiring to emigrate abroad. In spite of sluggish construction, lawyers are a guarantor of America's great advantage against China: pluralism, or the ability of diverse cultures to coexist and thrive under equal protection. Americans are engaged in robust debate about how to make their country better. The United States is more dynamic than Europe and can look to its own history to see the path forward. You can see the remnants of the engineering state amid the mighty industrial works scattered all over the country. Americans can draw on that legacy to stage their country's next act of transformation. I like to imagine how much better the world would be if both superpowers could adopt the pathologies of the other. China would be better if it could be more lawyerly, which means embracing substantive legal protections for individuals. America needs an engineering culture to build homes, build mass transit, and build the energy systems necessary to decarbonize. Ultimately, if America refuses to build, it will be subject to the whims of countries that do.
