The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off. Lawyers are too often servants of the rich. They help wealthy homeowners block construction projects or get creative with their taxes. It is sometimes puzzling to follow along intellectual property cases, many of which seem to be a thrilling game invented for lawyers. American judges have to deal with bewildering disputes, like hedge funds pursuing sovereign governments on debt payments. Litigation offers endlessly tantalizing possibilities for settling scores.

I don’t want to get rid of lawyers. Rather, I want to help lift the engineers (and also their technocratically minded brethren, the economists) back up. Not to raise them onto a pedestal but to elevate them so that there are other voices in the mix. The United States could use fewer lawyers who devote their careers to litigating the life out of government agencies and more lawyers of the dealmaker bent who are interested in working out how to deliver better services. Law professor Nick Bagley concluded his seminal paper on proceduralism (which I referenced in the first chapter) with a polite, but deceptively powerful, proposition that I want to echo: Lawyers should consider whether they could achieve more by stepping out of the way.

To succeed, the United States doesn’t need to adopt China’s means of construction. This book has detailed how the engineering state’s approach has wrought horrors and is no longer fit for purpose even in China. Rather, the United States can look toward other Western countries, like Spain, Germany, and Japan, which strike a better balance between public consultation and environmental review on the one hand and getting stuff built on the other.

To achieve all of this, I propose— very gently— to unwind the dominance of lawyers in the United States. That will require us to confront the proceduralism that exists inside government and broader society. And it will require us to renew our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.

The path forward demands that we reclaim a sense of optimism: an ability to make plans and deliver on them. The United States has to do two things to overcome the lawyerly society.

First, it has to remember that the country has a heritage of engineering. America built beautiful cities full of monumental buildings. Throughout the nineteenth century, it filled these cities with engineering marvels: the world’s then longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan (later superseded in length by the Golden Gate Bridge), the world’s first skyscrapers in Chicago, subway lines in New York City that ranked with any in Europe.

Americans have to trust that society can flourish without empowering lawyers to micromanage everything.