Julia Steinberg reviews Dan Wang's Breakneck: the US is a lawyerly society, China an engineering one

Summary

Dan Wang's Breakneck frames the US-China competition not as capitalism versus communism but as a lawyerly society versus an engineering one. In the US, the most prestigious career paths run through top law schools and Supreme Court clerkships. In China, the Politburo is populated overwhelmingly by engineers, and the governing instinct is execution — get from point A to point B — rather than adjudication of rights and process.

Julia Steinberg, who first encountered Wang's ideas through his essay How Technology Grows, identifies process knowledge as the book's intellectual core: the idea that manufacturing expertise is transmitted person-to-person, mentor to mentee, and that the US has voluntarily surrendered much of that knowledge by offshoring production to China. Wang documents how Chinese engineering communities have preserved and deepened that capacity, building some of the world's largest bridges in record time while the US can't repair a section of Pacific Coast Highway that slid into the ocean.

Where Steinberg pushes back

She argues Breakneck is too Keynesian in its admiration of Chinese state-directed construction. Airports in remote regions with fewer than six flights a week, bridges built to government mandate rather than market demand — she reads these as waste dressed up as industrial policy. Her stronger objection is that Wang conflates engineering capacity with cultural direction: China can designate a city to become the world's guitar manufacturing hub (a real example from the book, set in Guizhou) precisely because the state controls culture. The US can't replicate that top-down cultural coordination, and she's not sure it should try.

The more honest diagnosis, in her view, is that the US has a talent allocation problem rather than a pure capability gap. The country's best minds gravitate toward B2B SaaS rather than bridges or nuclear plants. She thinks that's starting to shift — there's a visible cultural pull back toward physical, durable manifestations of ambition — but it's happening organically, not by decree.

The US answer, she argues, is to double down on free markets rather than mimic Chinese state capacity. Private-sector engineering in the US already operates at high intensity; the drag comes from regulatory process — an illustration being the requirement to produce environmental impact reports on desert solar installations that might shade a tuft of grass, while chemical plants face lighter scrutiny through lobbying carve-outs.

The tension Wang surfaces but doesn't fully resolve is whether capitalism remains the right organizing framework for 21st-century industrial competition. Steinberg's answer is yes, but only if the US proves it by removing the procedural friction that currently makes state-led China look more competent at building things than it may actually be.