Lawyers have so many tools available to delay or prevent building. You don’t just feel the difference going from the lawyerly society to the engineering state: You saunter, tread, and amble upon its works.

As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person's relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals. Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul— a phrase from Joseph Staling repeated by Xi Jinping— heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

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.

7. Learning to Love Engineers

The United States has been weakened not only by a procedure-obsessed left— which has become so determined to avoid the errors of Moses that few big works are built at all— but also a thoughtlessly destructive right. I bring up Moses to suggest that the American left needs to rouse itself to deal with the problems of the present day rather than the problems of the previous midcentury.

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.