I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I was delighted to see that he returned to writing in the form of a long-form book, largely about the same subject. In writing my thoughts on this book, I returned to some of his earliest letters, which I found had aged like wine: I cannot recommend enough carving out an afternoon to read them.

Dan has this very specific and lovely blend of impressionism punctuated by hyper-specificity that I find really delightful: it is almost a kind of autofiction, the way he takes you by the hand and guides you through what he’s seen and how he thinks about it. You come away from his writing with the sense of having caught up with a very well-traveled friend from years ago.

Breakneck is a book about the United States and China, with a very specific thesis about the difference between the two countries that is repeated ad nauseam on the off chance that you've forgotten every ten pages or so. The thesis is thus:

China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.

If a book has a thesis, its goal is to convince you of that thesis’s validity; therefore, you must spend some time engaging with its thesis, weighing it in your hands as you might a supermarket orange.

My immediate reaction (during the prologue of the book, so jumping the gun a bit!) was to summon two counterpoints and patiently wait for Dan to address them:

1. Peak levels of American industrialization and state-sponsored coordination occurred during World War II, during which the makeup of the cabinet and legislative bodies were just as dominated by lawyers as they are today.
2. Japan’s levels of post-war industrialization, normalized per-capita, roughly match the U.S. during WWII or China over its recent boom, and Japan’s society (and culture) is bureaucratic to an extent that rivals if not surpasses America.

Neither of my quibbles are addressed; Dan indeed does not spend much time interrogating or defending his thesis, and more uses it as a neat bow for every story. (This is lampshaded: Dan says that he aims to be “inventive and even playful with these terms,” which feels like a lame way to avoid serious critique.)

Jonathon Sine, in a kind but excoriating review, makes broader points to dismantle Dan’s argument:

There was never a period in American government when lawyers did not dominate. If anything, lawyers may be less prevalent today in terms of background. Data on the composition of Congress, for example, is one hint. The Congressional share of lawyers has actually plunged to 34% over the last several decades (though it still has very few engineers: the Senate, the more lawyerly body, has 47 lawyers and 1 engineer). Meanwhile, the professionalization of the federal bureaucracy (which is not to say expansion—it has not expanded at all numerically since the 1960s) means executive agencies are probably staffed by a greater share of engineers, technocrats, and non-lawyer professional managerial personnel (though this is speculation).

I compiled the educational backgrounds of China’s Politburo members from 2002 to the present. In 2002, a stunning 70% of Politburo members had undergraduate engineering degrees. But by 2017 the share had fallen to just 20%, before rising again to 33% in 2022. The book does not observe or point out this rise and fall. Instead, it skips any mention of this quite drastic fall and jumps immediately to pointing out the rise of an ostensible aerospace engineering clique at the 20th Central Committee.

And perhaps it is because I am examining his writing through the lens of a Book (big, serious, important) rather than that of a Blog Post (whimsical, esoteric, precious) that I am finding pores and flaws I would have otherwise glossed over, but it feels almost impossible not to notice the lengths to which he tries to skew reality into his argument. Two notable instances:

1. Describing Joe Biden’s Senate career as being forever wedded to Delaware and Delaware’s interests as contrasted with the Chinese model of rotating officials throughout regions, and neglecting to even quietly mention in an aside the fact that the Senate mechanism for cross-pollination is in the form of subcommittees.
2. Breakneck’s third chapter — on technology — and yet the details outside of what you might see in general knowledge blogs or New York Times articles are surprisingly shallow. Dan outlines a three-point thesis for Chinese technology, tools, plans, and process power, and argues that process power has been the most important to Shenzhen's success, and then attempts to underscore that point not by talking about China, but about a Japanese onsen continuously repaired every 20 years.

Breakneck is, ultimately, not a good book, a conclusion I come to from a place of love and disappointment. Its goal, in a Straussian sense, is to be an artifact by which Dan can run a circuit on the Ezra Klein Shows of the world, from its clippable thesis to its glossy anecdata.

I agree with Dan that America should be more interested in China. I certainly want to learn more, not just about the big picture Wikipedia-tier stuff, but about the minutiae, the coordination and deployment of capital, the cultural cachet of bureaucracy, and so on.

Dan's writing is incredibly qualitative and anecdotal rather than quantitative. I don't have any inherent problem with this; his writing is at his best when he's talking in the first person, a vibes-based cultural critique akin to mid-period Didion.

But the vast majority of the stories he tells are, bluntly, things that I've already read on Twitter. I have already seen the tweets contrasting China's high-speed rail and SF opening a single mile of track; I have seen the tweets about the size and scale of Shenzhen’s megacampus. Don’t tell me that these things exist: explain, in thorough and fascinating detail, how they came to be!

It is tricky to shift from blogging into long-form writing; good books require weight. I hope Dan keeps writing; I hope he spends more time in the mode of travelogue than of airport nonfiction.

★