Each time the engineers built a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere.
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Barryâs attack hits home. I had once been an engineer, and I know an engineer doesnât design a bridge that might hold its load. An engineer starts with complexity and crafts certainty. I knew what it was like to be careful, to balance literally thousands of considerations in making a system work.
All of these studies, as well as our own Harvard Study, bear witness to the importance of human connections. They show that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. Sadly, this sense of disconnection from others is growing across the world. About one in four Americans report feeling lonelyâmore than sixty million people. In China, loneliness among older adults has markedly increased in recent years, and Great Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness to address what has become a major public health challenge.
Lawyers have so many tools available to delay or prevent building. You donât just feel the difference going from the lawyerly society to the engineering state: You saunter, tread, and amble upon its works.
Never mind that China has gotten less growth from each unit of new investment since its big infrastructure binge of 2008. The Communist Party continues to build because itâs full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists donât want to cede economic agency to the people.
China would be better off if it built less and built better. But we should also resist judging it by the standards of the United States, which is frankly underprovisioned in public infrastructure. Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that canât stop movingâ and that is a state that canât move at all.
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 worldâs then longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan (later superseded in length by the Golden Gate Bridge), the worldâs first skyscrapers in Chicago, subway lines in New York City that ranked with any in Europe.