As China emulated America’s past successes, the US government got busy undermining its own strengths. A procedure-obsessed left conspired with a thoughtlessly destructive right to constrain the government. Neither the left nor the right allows the state to deliver essential goods expected by the public. The Biden administration may have ushered through historic bills on industrial policy, but executive agencies were so obsessed with procedural concerns that little building actually took place before voters reelected Donald Trump, who has threatened to cancel many of these projects. The United States is still a superpower that is able to outclass China on many dimensions. But it is also in the grips of an ineffectual state where people are increasingly concerned with safeguarding a comfortable way of life.

Though the lawyerly society corrected the problems of the past, it has produced two pathologies that weaken the United States today.

The first is an elevation of processes over outcomes. In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.

But the United States will not remain a great power it it caters primarily to the wealthy. It’s failure to build enough has hurt working people and makes the country feel like a low-agency society.

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 it’s full of engineers and also because Marxist-Leninists don’t 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 can’t stop moving— and that is a state that can’t move at all.

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.