How lawyers ruined Britain

This is a Global Player original podcast. What do you think is wrong with Britain? What do you think's wrong with the United States? Now I know your initial reaction is, how long have you got? But there is something which is common, especially in the English speaking world overall actually. We take So long to build anything. Look around you, and the chances are you will see in the lived environment of wherever you live, of wherever you are right now, more of the nineteenth century.

than the 21st. In the UK, we take an average of 12 and a half years to build any significant piece of infrastructure, with 10 years usually just in the planning process. Think of it, crossrail, thirty years, end to end, Hinkley Point Power Station. seventeen years and counting. Don't even mention HS two. Housing hasn't been built in enough volume for decades. Environmental impact assessments now run to thirty thousand pages, taking seven years to write and approve.

We spent one hundred million quid on a bat tunnel. None of this happened by accident. And what if that lack of ability to build anything explains so much not just of our economic problems, but of our political ones too? What if our society has become, in effect, government of the lawyers? By the lawyer. For the lawyers. What if our problem is that we are now a loyally society rather than a building one?

where legal means always determine the ends. The legal tale wagging the economic and political dog. And what does it mean when our principal economic competitor, China, is none of those things? That's the question, the descent into the loyalist society that Dan Wong, an American academic, has posed in his extraordinary new book. Break now. China's Quest to Engineer the Future. It's receiving rave reviews as a new way of understanding the malaise which has gripped the West.

So we asked him into the news agent studio to explain what we don't understand about what is happening right now in China. Why Europe threatens to turn into a mausoleum continent. And whether China and the US are destined for a Titanic confrontation. Welcome to the news agents. The News Agents. Well, we're joined now by Dan Wong, who has written this extraordinary book. Dan, thanks so much for coming in. What made you want to write the book?

I spent six years living in China when it was a time where it felt like I was witnessing a pretty extraordinary time period. So when I was living in China between twenty seventeen to twenty twenty three, That was the time of Donald Trump's first trade war, and that was a time when Chinese technology companies were shooting up in levels of ambition.

That was a time when Xi Jinping grew more darkly repressive in all sorts of ways. And I, working as a technology analyst for a financial services firm, decided that we needed new ways to understand China beyond these capitalist, socialist, neoliberal terms that are pulled from the political science uh textbooks and I wanted to have a fresh and new framework for thinking about this big country.

Pursued by the Chinese Communist Party would be a sort of conservative Absolute fever dream in the West. Absolutely. This is a regime that really limits immigration, that really promotes manufacturing, where the uh political bosses really try to enforce traditional gender roles where there's pretty minimal redistribution.

This looks much more like a right wing Ronald Reagan Thatcherite country to me. A way of sort of illustrating the kind of premise of the book is something you talk about early on, which is this bike ride that you undertook when you were living there from Jiyang to Chongqing. Which Kind of I think gave you the idea. Could you just describe kind of what happened to you there and why that did plant that seed?

In twenty twenty one I was feeling a little bit cooped up in the city of Shanghai where I was living. This was sort of the peak of the zero covet enforcement as well as success. And so what I decided to do was to scare up two of my friends to go on a pretty lengthy bike ride with me in the mountains of southwest China.

mostly in Guaizhou province. And so over five days we cycled across Guaizhou province, heavily mountainous, pretty far away from the coasts. Um it is China's fourth poorest province. And what we saw there was a level of infrastructure much more developed than California or New York, two of America's richest states. So Guizhou province has these superb airports. It has not only the fifty tallest bridges in China, but fifty of the world's tallest bridges.

And what we saw there was just, you know, uh the superb infrastructure, including high speed rail, that really surpasses all sorts of infrastructure in developed world levels. Something that California has been talking about for twenty years and has I think built a sort of, you know, tiny

section of viaducts as well as concrete and steel in a section of the desert, which is not too difficult at all. And so I think that, you know, the California high speed rail, which is meant to connect San Francisco in the north and Los Angeles in the south, probably will not see um any real trains running through it.

about three decades after the completion of the referendum that California voters uh decided to say, well, we need high speed rail between our uh two biggest cities, whereas the Chinese are absolutely building so many of these, mostly under budget and totally uh at time.

And the way that um you sort of explain this difference, which is I think the sort of novel conceptual thing about the book. Is you try and explain why that is. It's well known obviously that China has made extraordinary leaps in terms of its economic development, its infrastructure development. Although as you say, I think because China is a relatively close society still, most of us in the West are probably not aware of just how.

sophisticated and just how advanced that infrastructure has become vis-a-vis our own. But you explain that difference by talking about the difference sort of society that the United States And actually most of our Western societies have become versus China. And you talk about China being engineering society or an engineering state. And the American society being a loyalist society or a loyalist state. Just explain what you mean by that.

I call China an engineering state because at various points in the recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership had degrees in engineering. This was engineering of a very Soviet sort, in which the last general secretary uh had a degree in hydraulic engineering.

Uh the present general secretary, Xi Jinping, has a degree in chemical engineering, and I think the issue with engineers is that they really like to build a lot of stuff, whether these are roads or bridges or high speed rail throughout the vast countryside.

They also treat the economy as an engineering exercise. So they will try to really prompt some of the smartest kids graduating from top unis, um, away from working in, let's say, finance uh or journalism uh or something like um the consumer internet into working in aviation or semiconductors or

really strategic sectors. So it's directed from that level of the Chinese state. That's right. And they really try to reorient people's um all of their directives. Um and they do this in part by smacking around big tech founders like Jack Ma. We're telling the finance industry you cannot pay uh workers more than three hundred thousand dollars a year, which was a directive from Xi Jinping last year.

And they're also, unfortunately, engineers of the human soul, which is a phrase from Stalin that Xi Zi Ming has repeated in the last few years, in which they can be awfully literal minded about treating society as a giant math exercise. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the one child policy, as well as zero COVID, which I lived through, which the number is right there in the name, no ambiguity about what these things could possibly mean.

I contrast that with the United States, which I call the lawyerly society, because so many US presidents went to law school. If we take a look at the um early American presidents, everyone from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, thirteen of America's first sixteen presidents had all practiced law.

Five of the last ten US presidents went to law school. Indeed, one was a respected constitutional law professor in the form of Obama. Yes, exactly. Um and so when Obama lectures at the University of Chicago Law School and then becomes president, actually he's treading on a very well trod path.

And the issue with lawyers. Uh one of whom was Herbert Hoover, the other of whom was um Jimmy Carter, both of whom are I think better remembered for their political failures than their um you know rousing successes. The issue with lawyers is that they block absolutely everything and so you don't have stupid ideas like the one child policy. You also don't have functional infrastructure almost anywhere in the US. Now, if I could sneak in a word about uh the United Kingdom.

Maybe the only thing stranger than the lawyer lease society is the P PE society you've got over here. Isn't it very strange that all the prime ministers study P PE at

Oxford University, especially at Balliol College. I f I find that very, very strange how concentrated that is. Well as a history and politics graduate I'll leave that to one side. Although we should return to it'cause I think it is an interesting distinction. But I think this is the fascinating thing. Like The idea of a loyalty society is a very important thing

is one where, as you say, limits are placed upon things. The opposite of China, right? Is that legal, regulatory constraints in order to stop doing things. But the fundamental difference is as an engineering society. The Objective is to unlock how to do things. And thou that's the different direction that the two kind of models have gone in. That's right. You cannot build a bridge or a subway line without some degree of rationalism. The bridge really has to stand.

And in that case, I think you really want engineers um to take all of the um science, engineering sci uh the technology very, very seriously. The problem with China is that they're not all only a bunch of physical engineers. The fundamental problem with China is that they're also

social engineers, who treat the population as yet another building material to be torn down or remolded as they wish. I suppose the interesting thing is to consider of c I mean, you're right. I mean obviously the United States has had a long history because of its particular form of political

evolution has had a long history of of chief executives of presidents who have been lawyers or at least have, you know, however briefly practiced law, which obviously China does not have a totally different legal system, a different political system. But it's true to say though, isn't it, I know you talk about this in the book. It is true to say that societies

Like the United States, indeed like the United Kingdom, they were once engineering societies in a way that's roughly comparable to China, right? I mean, you know, in the nineteenth century, either in the UK or in the US, I mean, you know, zoning law, planning law virtually didn't exist. It was possible, indeed not just possible, but huge engineering advances took place, whether it was railroads or whatever it happened to be.

So it's something that we've lost, it's not something that we never had. That's absolutely right. I think that the United States was absolutely an engineering state. I date roughly between the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. So over this um about a hundred plus year stretch.

The United States built these canal systems and railway systems and highway systems, as well as these instances of the technological sublime like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo missions that really inspired the world. And I think something really shifted throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties in the United States when The United States absolutely overbuilt.

Yes, in the city of New York. But also further uh throughout the American countryside, the US Department of Agriculture was spraying DDT as well as the U.S. Other pesticides throughout the entire farmland. You had the Army Corps of Engineers dam essentially every river in the American West. In the United States, I think one could accurately say overbuilt.

And that was a there was a correction, um, especially among law students at the time where the uh students at elite law schools like Harvard Law or Yale law where I used to be a fellow decided that You know, what they were most interested in doing was less the sort of creative deal making of the sort that uh many lawyers were in the New Deal Cabinet working with Franklin D. Roosevelt to implement a lot of ambitious projects.

A lot of lawyers' uh highest callings became stopping projects, stopping projects from both the government as well as corporations. And I think that this was absolutely a necessary corrective in the sixties and seventies to really stop a lot of overbuilding in the US. And I am s thinking that what we have are in the in twenty twenty five are not exactly the same problems as we had in the nineteen sixties.

Right now the US and I dare say the UK suffers from way too little housing construction. People don't have enough homes, that people really need new energy sources, especially clean ones. That the manufacturing base has pretty substantially rusted. And I think that what we need is a new governing paradigm in which the elites embrace a little bit more construction and engineering to meet the needs of today. So what you're saying is is that

Part of the problem of our malaise because I think it's fair to say we have a malaise particularly in in the UK, a lot of these problems are even more acute than they are in in the United States.

Part of our problem in terms of sort of relative economic underperformance and a way to understand this malaise which is affecting our economics but also our politics as well, because the two are obviously interwoven, is to say that We basically have still got a kind of paradigm or conception of of politics and law. Which it was designed to deal with the problems of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies of overdevelopment.

Whereas actually we have the exact opposite problem now, which is underdevelopment, but we haven't changed our kind of legal mindset and political mindset. That's right. I think that too many of the people who really um were m activists and changing a lot of the ground rules of a society

have now aged and they are now very substantially homeowners. They're at the top of various ladders and they're still more interested in pulling up ladders rather than bring the ladder down so that kids and grandchildren can have economic opportunities. that there are too many people who are citing environmental loss, which are absolutely good in many, many ways.

but are citing environmental loss in order to stop construction because they have often some sort of vested interest in making sure that their lives are still as uh good as they expected them to be. Is there something sort of is is this a sort of continuum? I mean th what you describe as the sort of you have a societies which have had a engineering phase and then a sort of loyalty phase.

Is that a sort of is there something almost like tealological and inevitable about that? I.e., could China end up in a kind of loyal lee phase? Or is it something that's more Sort of particular to different societies and their own sort of paths of development, do you think? Yeah, I I love the word continuum and I I think that the word continuum would work very well if we could

Slide up and down through this continuum. Unfortunately, what it looks like is that we are a little bit stuck, and I am skeptical that the Chinese will end up looking quite like the British or the Americans in terms of having a loyalist society. In part because I think that there are very few Chinese

emperors or Chinese uh leaders that have had very substantial training in law. That the law is not quite so respected, that there is quite a lot less autonomy and individual freedom in China, that there is much more a sense of the less of a concept of individual rights by comparison to the Western tradition. That's absolutely right. The uh practice of absolutism has been in place in China for hundreds of years before the European monarchs ever whiffed the idea.

And so I see that the Chinese are much more interested in increasing the discretion of the state relative to the individual. And so I think that it will not really be quite rule by lawyers. Maybe China will get stuck in some ways.

But I also think that they are going to continue overbuilding in all sorts of ways. Well I want I want to come back to that and the trade-offs with the China model, because we shouldn't pretend as if and you don't in a book, uh in fairness, that you know, the model is entirely rosy and something that we should completely emulate. But just to push back on the on the idea of the loyality society a bit. I can completely get that, funnily enough, and I know Britain wasn't your, you know

It wasn't what you were thinking about when you were writing this, you think about the United States. But you know, as a Brit reading this, the lessons from it and the analysis of it I think are even more acute and pronounced perhaps than than than the US for various reasons. I mean I suppose with the US from an outsider's point of view, you know, when I go to the US I go a lot

Two things. One, the development which does and is taking place, particularly in certain states in the South and the Sun Belt and so on, huge data centers being built, you know, hugely new parts of the of the economy emerging, plus the fact that when we do think of technological development, engineering

I mean the US has been responsible for so many of those advances, particularly in terms of technology and the internet since the nineteen nineties, that we have transformed our societies. So the Americans They're not doing too badly, are they, in terms of being an engineering state still? Aaron Ross Powell No, no. I think that the Americans are still doing very, very well. And I want to praise the lawyers at least in one respect, which is that um lawyers are pretty good at protecting wealth.

And I think that is an important thing. IP and so on as well. That's right. I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley as a uh fellow at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution and I think that the west coast of America is remarkable. for being the only region of the world that has not only created a company worth over a trillion dollars, but has created

several trilli companies worth over several trillions of dollars. Not at all. And so when you have, you know, these very rich companies, um, what it indicates is that The rich feel comfortable about creating big companies in America. They have the protections, um, they have IP protections and

you know, somewhat distressingly now, I think that we're able to see that they have political um protections if they're able to have dinner with uh Donald Trump in the White House and ful fulsomely praise him. I think there's there's no better country in the world to be a member of the rich. because you can easily transmute that into political influence. In China, if you're a member of the rich, there's a pretty decent chance that Xi Jinping will come around and smack you here and there.

In Europe one can't even build very much wealth anymore. Mostly uh most of the wealth in Europe is simply pass down through inheritance. Now, uh Lewis, you brought up the UK a little bit. I didn't get that um much into the UK in my book, mostly because I haven't spent enough time here, mostly also because I didn't want to be too mean. But I've been glad to have been able to mention in the pages of the F T that what the UK is really good at is the sounding clever um industry.

So you know, these are everything that you're doing. No, no, absolutely. And you're so good at it. So um you know the sounding clever industries include Podcasting and journalism and finance and consulting and uh be regular now. When I said be nasty, I didn't mean this nasty, Jesus. Well uh here we go. If we we can swear e even a little bit, then that's that's really good. So

The UK has very substantially deindustrialized and I have not quite appreciated how high the housing costs are here and how high the energy costs are here as well. And so it's highest in Europe pretty much. Highest in Europe. And my the rule of thumb is that The Germans are have I I believe something like six times as much as the first time.

Greater energy costs than the Chinese do, and I think the UK is on par with that. And so it there are all sorts of ways in which this doesn't feel like a robust picture of health. Right, we'll be back with more from Dan Wong just after this. UK under Ran News here in Edinburgh. My American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of app or the new LBC app. Leading Britain's conversation. The news agents. When you talk about the PPE society, do you think that's different from the Loreley Society?

You know, I one criticism I will absolutely concede with the Lawyer Lee Society is that this is not unique to the United States. A lot of the difficulties with construction flow from the common law system, which is an inheritance that the Americans picked up from the British. And just just explain case people don't know, this is basically as you say an English or British legal particular legal system as opposed to a sort of codified system that they tend to have in

European countries and so it is something that we've sort of bequeathed to different parts of the Anglosphere world, the US, Canada, et cetera, et cetera. And one way to understand the common law system is that uh citizens or activist groups are able to convince a judge to uh, you know, that's a good idea

put a hold on a new housing development or new infrastructure development, the judges are much more empowered to do something like that. And my view now is when it comes to building public works, never trust anyone who speaks English. Explain why why you think that's the same thing. generally have not been very good at building. In fact the Europeans have been much more impressive at building something like high speed rail in Spain or not subway lines in Denmark.

Yeah and Well again they have a little bit more of the I mean it's nowhere near as much, but they have some of the tendencies that you were talking about in the Chinese system. Not so much that they have no regard for individual rights and so on, but in British Anglo Sphere systems that kind of Lockean conception of kind of rights of property rights is so central

As opposed to you know, most European states have a bit more history of a bit of, you know, dirigisma, right? Like dirigis central states planning and directing. You know, the French built high speed rail in the way that they did in the nineteen sixties, in a way that, you know, we have never got anywhere close to, partly because the French central state dictates that it will happen and it happens.

And the French have been excellent engineers as well. Their nuclear plants are some of the best run in the world. Uh some of their smartest people go work in the nuclear plants, and I think that this is something that I hope the British can pick up a little bit from the continent. I suppose in terms of looking at China though, I mean isn't it the case that we wouldn't want that model, would you?

As much as a problem as you say that the loyalist society might be, although as you say as well, that can generate its own economic return because, you know, legal stability is really important. IP that we've talked about, all of those things as a reason so many engineers and people want to come from China and place to can work in places like the US.

But nonetheless, as you say, there is something central and much darker to those extraordinary infrastructure projects that we see in China, which is a pretty wanton disregard for individual life. Individual rights. and as you say, a government which is quite happy to basically use its population as just yet another

input into the machine and see what comes out at the end of it. We wouldn't want to have those that sort of attitude, would we? No, absolutely not. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about the brutalities of the one child policy. This is one of the the most central chapters of my book. And I don't know if an author is allowed to have a favorite chapter, but my favorite chapter was writing about the one child policy. The scale of the brutality that the Communist Party visited upon

especially the countryside. I describe it as a uh mostly a campaign of rural terror meted out against overwhelmingly female bodies. According to China's own statistics, these are the official statistics released by the government. Um China over the thirty five years of the one child policy period conducted about three hundred and twenty million abortions. It sterilized about a hundred million women and sterilized about twenty five million men.

writing about this chapter was really examining this parade of horrors that the the party delivered, and also thinking a little bit about, you know, as a um resident and a um admirer of Shanghai. that Shanghai suffered uh one of the most ambitious lockdowns ever attempted in the history of humanity in the year twenty twenty two, when for a period of eight to ten weeks, twenty five million people could not leave their apartment compounds.

many people went food insecure because the engineers were so literal minded about targeting a number, zero covid, um, that it really didn't allow people to go outside and fend for themselves in any sort of meaningful way. And I think that it is absolutely not the case that we should adopt almost any part of the social engineering program. But I wanna say that there are some things that we can

learn from China, but at least study from China. And China isn't necessarily the only model here. We should study a little bit of the French development, for example, on nuclear, the Spanish development on high speed rail, some of these Chinese developments on building new bridges, let's say.

So let's study from the rest of the world and let's make the West much better through pluralism. What do you think which uh obviously pluralism is not something that is enjoyed in China? And that is ul ultimately, I mean, what you're describing, and we've to go back to the continuum, I mean there is a probably there is a trade off between pluralism, individual rights and the ability of central states to direct economic development, right? There probably is just a trade off there.

I think clearly in your book you're making the argument and others make the argument as well, that that has become two waites in one direction. Which has particular generational consequences as well. But let's just think about the China model for a moment. Do you think that there has been so much speculation over the years as to whether the Chinese are creating huge problems for themselves over the long term? Do you think that the Chinese model as it has existed will eventually come undone.

I think that there are absolutely self limiting aspects of the Chinese model. Um in part by thinking about something, for example, like the one child policy. The Chinese felt that they had um it crisis of overpopulation, when China's population crossed over a billion people in the year nineteen eighty.

And so they imposed what they thought was an elegant solution. And what is uh the problem today? Well, very many women have no desire to have children, um, in part because the state has told them one child is bad. And China's uh T FR, the total fertility rate is uh one point oh right now, one of the lowest in the world, far lower than Japan.

And so one can cite all sorts of these instances in which the Communist Party has made pretty substantial mistakes that looked perhaps reasonable at the time and they have, for example, crushed the property sector and that is one of the great problems of China's um economic malaise right now. I think there are absolutely self limiting aspects of China's system and what I want to caution against is feeling like the system will

collapse of its own accord in exactly the same way that the Soviet Union, for example, did. I think that China is not exactly the same as the Soviet Union. It has a much more functional economy than the Soviets ever did. It is not exactly like Japan, because I think that their is also a a more functional economy with um you know a a much more greater focus on catching the next technological wave that the Japanese were not able to accomplish. My view is that if we take a look at only the

um you know, negative side of the ledger sheet. If we take a look only at, you know, the uh worst aspects of the United States or the United Kingdom It can be a pretty ugly picture. And what we have to do is also balance that with the strengths, of which the Chinese also possess quite a lot. And my view of US China competition over the longer term is that

This is something that's going to last for years and decades to come. And we shouldn't expect either the United States or China to collapse, that either system will simply dissolve. The country that's ahead, I think, will make mistakes of hubris as well as overconfidence.

much as he did by smacking around entrepreneurs or having this controlled demolition of the property sector, the country that's behind will feel the crack of the whip really to try to reform. So I think that this is going to be a dynamic race over the longer run. Anything is ahead right now?

Very hard to say. I think that um you know, coming to you from the United States, I would not say that President Donald Trump has covered the country in glory, that there are all sorts of um problems right now that are completely self inflicted, I think, by Donald Trump. There's economic problems, um, there's um the tariff issue, cost of living issues. um he has completely blown up the diplomatic goodwill um that uh many people feel

have felt disposed, well disposed towards the United States. This war against American higher education institutions which have been the motor of American economic dynamism for a long time. Speaking to you as a scholar at Stanford University, I don't like feeling quite attacked um in a in a general way by Donald Trump. And so, you know, there is this odd r retribution that Donald Trump is visiting against his political enemies. There's all sorts of issues with

you I'm sure would approve of. Is Trump moving America away from the Loyalist Society? In the sense that we have an administration and at least for now a Congress? and a judicial branch which is relatively unwilling to impede his power, which, compared to most American administrations, has been

Pretty disregarding of the rule of law in all sorts of ways. I mean is he moving America away from the lawyerly society? No, I would not say so. Uh first of all I would say that Donald Trump is fundamentally a product of the lawyerly society. We cannot understand uh Donald Trump's business career without seeing how central lawsuits are.

This man has sued absolutely everyone. He has sued his former business partners, he has sued his political opponents. Is he suing the BBC yet? I'm not sure if that has to be such a good thing. Well he's threatening to sue, but curiously enough, uh it hasn't materialized as yet. Well maybe after this interview we'll see that case in court. Yes, indeed.

So um and there is a way in which uh Donald Trump is very loyally in terms of intimidating people, flinging accusations left and right, and trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion. And there was a time, I think there was a flicker of a moment, um, when We f might have thought that Elon Musk and Doge could have brought some engineering ethos into the US government.

Unfortunately, uh Elon himself has gone kind of crazy himself. I think that is generally acknowledged. And Elon was quickly fired as co president, uh, six minutes after his tenure. And so I think that there might have been a flicker of a moment in which Donald Trump really did sort of try to do the sort of reforms that would be necessary to move the United States forward. And also think that Donald Trump is a product of the lawyerly society in another way. That

Too many people uh have not felt that their lives have gotten substantially better, that manufacturing losses have been very substantial, cost of living has really gotten up, especially in housing. And I think that when the economics aren't really good, people turn towards

populist politicians like Donald Trump, as well as maybe others we can name in the UK as well as Europe, and I'm not really sure that these populist solutions will really meet the needs of the moment. But indeed as well, so often More liberal political forces.

have tended to intellectually and conceptually seem unable to break free of the kind of intellectual shackles of the period that that you're talking about, of this sort of long period from the nineteen sixties and seventies, to save the system from itself against these populist forces.

Something I'm optimistic for, because I'm always a sunny optimist from California, uh, is that, you know, w the United States will be able to have some form of reform. that I think that there is a need among especially the Democratic Party to be less loyally. The Democratic Party is far more loyal. Do you think it's possible because it is possible of course again, I mean, because this is you know, we haven't seen this play out before

Let's assume your conception is right, we are anchored in this kind of loyalist society. Obviously the very fact of that Presumably makes it very difficult to reform the system. Because actually what you require it's a sort of slack catch twenty two, which is you need to break the system and in order to break the system, or or at least substantially reform it, you need to break out of that kind of loyalty kind of

black hole that you're stuck in. So is it actually possible? Well, Donald Trump is breaking parts of the system and we need to put it back together again and accept in a much better way. I think that there is much of a um, conversation among the Democratic Party of, you know, how do we actually build more housing? How do we actually build uh more clean energy? And that is represented very well by the book Abundance.

And I think there there is as well as uh Derek Thompson. And I think that there is also much more energy within the Democratic Party to think about how to properly do industrial policy, how to, you know, build a lot more manufacturing jobs, how to build a lot more clean energy. And in some sense I I still feel that, you know, Donald Trump is always

the wrong answer, but he often asks good questions. And once you break a lot of things, you know, the the one thing that I'll say, to be kind to Donald Trump and to get this lawsuit off our backs, um, is to say that Donald Trump is disruptive and often often it changes uh uh shakes out in bad ways, but one could always hope that it shakes out in a better way this time. If you had to

Let's talk not just about the US but the UK as well here. Practically speaking, to break out of this malaise, to break out of the loyal loyalist society, what do we have to do? Well, my big hope is that as the um UK as well as the US Let's say do simple progrowth things like

build a little bit more housing in um places that need a little bit more housing. More young people will move in, more businesses will move in, the neighbors will feel that, oh, isn't it kind of nice to see a few more baby strollers on our street to have a few more bookstores or bakeries on our street. And that triggers a little bit of a positive cascade of being excited for growth. And I think that this excitement for growth is something that

China as well as the United States really share. That you don't really need to convince the people or the elites that growth is good. Whereas here in uh what I what I find in Europe as well as the UK is that it's a little bit tougher sleds to, you know, really try to convince people that growth is good. They kind of view it as abstract. They they sorta fear it. There's maybe ten to twenty percent of the population that really believe in degrowth, which I find

a very strange um ideology. Well I think one of the things that you don't get in the US but you definitely get and I I'm I've I've got this a lot from different politicians in it's certainly on that part of the spectrum is if you start talking about growth the instant thing and I can understand it but it's interesting. the instant thing that you get is to say, well growth for whom? You know, i.e., what's the point in having growth if the top one percent are taking it all?

Well let's have growth for everyone. And then the I think that has to be the response that we have growth, um much more for let's say the um, you know, uh bottom few quintiles of society. That I think what we can achieve is growth for all. What uh many people need are more houses, better mass transit, um better jobs. Um and so I don't think that, you know, we should necessarily preclude that uh growth is uh something that can only exist for the top one percent.

And I think that, you know, if we are able to have a few of these positive flywheel effects and to have, you know, lower energy costs, lower housing costs, I think that people will demand more of it. And something that I think that the Americans and the Chinese are are both really good at is that

The governments have this raw craving for geopolitical power that they really wear on their sleeves. And I think for the most part, that is making the country more sovereign and more autonomous in various crucial ways. the American entrepreneurs and Chinese entrepreneurs really care about making donuts. You know. They wanna hustle. They care about the money. Whereas here in the UK and Europe, it just becomes really, really difficult for people to imagine building really big businesses at all.

I'm still often struck that what's really holding up the European equity markets are Asian consumers buying French handbags. That doesn't sound very sustainable to me. When you come to Europe come to the UK, do you get the sense of

a realized sense of what some people talk about now which is a museum continent. Continents just out of the race. Oh well I find that way too nice. I uh in my opening pages I call Europe a mausoleum economy. And so, you know, it is very beautiful, but feels quite stagnant in debt.

And I do spend quite a bit of time in Europe. My my wife is Austrian and over the summer we spent quite a bit of time in Denmark, which is one of the great economic successes of the EU so far, mostly because of novel nordis. But it just happened to be the case that while we were living in Copenhagen over the summer, I cracked open the newspaper and I saw that Novo Nordisk's share price fell by about thirty percent.

They had to fire the CEO in part because of competition from the American side of Eli Lilly. And what I really, really worry about with Europe is that No, on the one hand, they are their uh top firms are not quite as competitive as American firms in biotech and financial services, in software as well as AI.

And on the other hand, they're clearly be deindustrialized by the Chinese right now, that the Germans especially are losing a lot of their automotive and industrial expertise to the Chinese. And so when you have when you're sort of being squeezed on both sides,

I think that, you know, as the economy weakens I suspect the politics will not get better, and if these populist parties all win, I s I'm a little bit skeptical that they will be able to deliver all of these solutions that make the economy more competitive and more growth friendly.

the kind of l lack of urgency that there is. People here don't want to make donuts. What what's up with that? Just finally, do you think there is a lot of speculation about and obviously there's been much analysis about whether you know the US and China

are destined for conflict. I mean clearly they're in the midst of some economic conflict right now. You talk in the book actually and you've alluded to it there about how similar the two countries are in a weird way. I mean in terms of the the public and public attitudes in a way that is not commonly appreciated.

Do you think that they're destined for confidence? No, I don't think that it is inevitable. But um, you know, this is something that I hope that all of us spend a little bit of time thinking about to prevent the next great conflagration in the world. World War One caused several millions of deaths. World War Two caused several tens of millions of deaths and we really don't wanna get into the next order of magnitude and anything like World War Three.

And what I'm really hopeful for is that people become a little bit more curious about everyone else. I think that especially writing as a Canadian, I'm spending most of my time in the United States. I very clearly choose the United States because I prize pluralism, because I prize freedom of speech. I prize the ability to buy books when I when I can. What I'm really trying to do is to write for

You know, people living in, let's say, a a lawyer in Indiana or someone uh living in, let's say, rural Sussex uh in the UK, m many of these people will never actually visit China. And what I'm really hopeful is that people can be at least a little bit more curious about What is going right in China, what is desperately going wrong. And I think that the Chinese should absolutely also be more curious about Europe as well as um the United States. And I think that

If we're all adopting a an attitude of mutual curiosity, that's the best way to keep us all out of trouble. Well, we may be good at sort of sounding clever, but we're even better at sounding curious. The best at it. Hey, at least we've got a growth industry down bottom. Thank you so much for the first time.

The news agents. Well, I found that absolutely fascinating. A reminder that his book Breakneck by Dan Wong is out now. I really can't recommend it enough. No John or Emily this week, of course, they're off watching Z car reruns with Nigel Farage at the Bletchley Park Air Show.

But of course they'll be back next week, thanks as ever to our production team. On the news agents, Natalie Inge, Michaela Walters, Mikey Baggs, Jess Williamson, Anna Georgievitch, Shane Fenley, and newly promoted Arvin Badderwell. You really can't get the staff these days. Our exec producer is Louis Dagenhart, our editor,

It's Tom Hughes, a reminder to listen to my imaginatively titled Sunday show on LBC, Sunday with Lewis Goodall from 10 for the best political interviews. At the weekend, we though will be back on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a Global Player Original Production.