Urban Governance: Balancing Procedures and Outcomes

It’s fun to play a game of superlatives with China. From the awe-inspiring and cyberpunk scale of the metro trains cruising through apartment blocks in Chongqing to the stupendous rate of its shipbuilding, housing construction and waterworks, China has shown that it can build like no other. That includes the just-announced Medog Hydropower Station, which at $167 billion would be one of the largest and most expensive construction projects ever seen. Behind all of this activity is a state organized for engineering, designed for speed and scale.

That’s one half of the thesis of Breakneck, the new book out by Dan Wang, which was already long listed for book of the year by the Financial Times. The other half of the thesis is that America is ruled by a lawyerly society, one that holds up projects across years of red tape and lawsuits in the name of everything from noise pollution to just good old-fashioned trolling. Can we have growth without the lawyers? And what are the costs when every project can’t be debated to its most minute detail?

Dan and host Danny Crichton talk about Dan’s trips across China, the massive growth he witnessed while living in the country for six years, and comparisons between China, America, South Korea and Japan, and why the virtuous cycle of construction is so absent from America today.