I’ve just finished Dan Wang’s Breakneck. Strong recommend (no affiliation).
Why can’t we build things anymore?
Wang’s book tackles this lament, which runs through the political conversation from pot holes to HS2.
The lawyer vs engineer framing (Warning, contains nuance).
Blaming lawyers for blocking progress is a trick beloved of populists the world over. They do it because it works. Lawyers are unpopular, until you need one on your side.
So, let’s be careful with the lawyer-engineer binary; I admire China’s bridges but don’t want to live there etc.
The flip of the CCP’s engineering mindset is a chilling disregard for personal liberty, a tendency to social control, treating citizens as raw material to be shaped by policies like one-child and zero-COVID. The results are cataclysmic if you live in the way of the next train line.
With that caveat…Wang characterises the US (and by extension ‘the West’) as a ‘lawyer society’ at the political level, focused on process, rules, and regulatory arbitrage. We reward the mastery of process over achieving results. We incentivise blocking, vetoing and weaponising rules to protect existing interests over risk and building new things.
When in doubt, commission a report.
Sport is an industry run by lawyers for lawyers. Discuss.
If that’s an argument you want to build, it’s not hard to find supportive evidence from the daily news agenda.
Even the sainted Parkrun doesn’t get through Whitehall without yet another feasibility study (from The Times this week).
This next one is from Ed Warner’s Sport Inc newsletter:
