When an organization confronts a large number of novel problems, a top-down structure is likely to be a choke point. As issues get escalated, problems pile up on the doorstep of senior leaders who often lack the experience and bandwidth to make smart, speedy decisions. Over time, the backlog grows and the pace of decision making decelerates. Stratification is the enemy of speed.

In many large organizations, the challenge is often diagnosed as internal. That is, the organization’s competitive problems may be much lighter than the obstacles imposed by its own outdated routines, bureaucracy, pools of entrenched interests, lack of cooperation across units, and plain-old bad management. Thus, the guiding policy lies in the realm of reorganization and renewal. And the set of coherent actions are changes in people, power, and procedures. In other cases the challenge may be building or deepening competitive advantage by pushing the frontiers of organizational capability.

Right now, its failing. It won't be able to respond to climate change, drive better economic outcomes, or deliver broader measures of social equality if the physical world remains underdeveloped. American governance is stronger if it can demonstrate that it has a political system capable of delivering essential services to its people, including safe public streets, functioning mass transit, and plentiful housing. For various American ideals to be fully realized, the country will need to recover its ethos of building, which I believe will solve most of its economic problems and many of its political problems too.

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.