My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.