The New York subway system, built largely by Irish labour a century ago, is a mass-transit achievement that shuttles four million commuters around the city every day. Exposed metal rivets jutting out of steel girders give this amazing transport network a gritty, early 20th century factory-floor vibe. The people who built it were more interested in function than form. It feels like something from another age, because it is. It comes from the era when the US built big – that great age of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the New York subway system.
Today these monuments look like remnants of some disappeared civilisation. The United States doesn’t do this type of thing any more. Even New York feels stagnant, as if the builders walked off site sometime in the mid-20th century. Contrast JFK, the first structure many visitors experience in America, with the ultra-modern airports in China, the US’s main rival for global supremacy, and it underscores the notion of one culture on the way up and the other on the way down.
Why can’t America seem to build large infrastructural projects, while the Chinese are pushing the boundaries of engineering limitations every day? This question is not exclusive to the United States; Ireland can’t build anything, anywhere, at any price. Consider rail transport, where about 3 per cent of the Republic’s railway lines are electrified, the lowest rate in the EU, and the State’s stock of roads, housing and utilities, which a recent IMF report found to be about 32 per cent below comparable countries. Why is this?
A lazy ideological answer is that the US and Ireland are capitalist countries and more socialist state planning is required to build infrastructure. However, the country in Europe with the best railway network is Switzerland, where 5,300km of rail network is almost entirely electrified. Switzerland also consistently ranks among the world’s most capitalist economies. The ability and willingness to build infrastructure cannot be attributed solely to ideology. There’s something else going on.
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That something is the subject of a new book that compares America with China and might also explain why Ireland is so poor at building infrastructure. Dan Wang’s book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future reframes the competition between China and the US as a clash of political-technical temperaments and outlooks.
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The central thesis of the book is simple: different national temperaments produce systematically different economic and state-capacity outcomes. China is an “engineering state” that treats big problems with a builder’s problem-solving mentality. The US, by contrast, is a lawyerly society, where a confrontational justice system and legal proceedings dominate decision making. A country run by engineers will build and accelerate into the future, while a country run by lawyers will litigate and decelerate back to the past.
Wang contends that China is a kind of “Leninist technocracy” where technical training and an institutional habit of mass mobilisation matter as much as any party ideology. The engineering impulse is cultural and historical. Many of China’s leading cadres come from this tradition and a broad engineering culture remains central to state action. In contrast, the US is dominated by a legalistic ruling-class. Since independence, more than half of all US presidents, vice-presidents and members of Congress have come from a legal background. Every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee from 1984 through to 2020 went to law school.
The upshot is a different set of competencies and incentives at the top. Engineers prize completion, scale and speed. Lawyers prize process and rights, leading to more checks, litigation, and more ways to delay and block infrastructure projects. Engineering China is surging, while lawyerly America struggles to build. The figures are stark.
In the first 15 years of the 21st century, China accounted for nearly half the world’s total urbanisation. During the pandemic, the Chinese authorities claimed to have built an entire new hospital in just 10 days. Think about Ireland’s Children’s Hospital debacle.
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China has also been adding nearly two billion square metres of floor space to its cities every year – equivalent to creating an urban area the size of London. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, China consumed more concrete than the US used in the entire 20th century and accounts for just over half of the world’s total annual 4.1 billion tonnes of cement production (52 per cent). In 2020, the country used an estimated 2.4 billion tonnes of cement, 23 times the amount used in the US in the same year.
If we buy into the thesis that the personalities and backgrounds of the political and technocratic classes matter, determining state capacity, where does Ireland sit? Traditionally drawn heavily from teachers, farmers, local councillors and a marked number of lawyers, Irish politics is dominated by groups who prefer legal process and negotiated compromise to large-scale technical project delivery. If ministers, advisers and senior civil servants lack engineering backgrounds, the State’s default responses to complex construction and systems projects will tend to be slower, more legalistic and more risk-averse.
A recent analysis of the outgoing Dáil (2020–24) from The Journal reveals that 13 of 160 TDs, or 8.1 per cent, practised law – while just 0.9 per cent of Ireland’s workforce are in legal professions. This means lawyers are roughly nine times over-represented in the Dáil. Similarly, farmers and teachers also each made up about 8 per cent of TDs, again well out of proportion to their share of the public more generally. In contrast, only about 1 per cent of TDs had healthcare backgrounds vs about 4 per cent in the workforce, and – wait for it – not one TD comes from the tech/engineering sector.
A system where senior appointments favour lawyers or constituency-centred politicians over engineers and builders will produce procurement rules, judicial review thresholds and planning cultures that favour slow process over swift, large-scale mobilisation. Repeated judicial and planning delays evidence this national bias, and all the while railways are not built, roads are not extended, houses are not completed and the quality of life of the average person is diminished.
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Ireland requires a cultural shift in how we run the place. We need to broaden the skill set in the rooms where decisions are made. Fast-tracking projects means appointing more engineers to key planning bodies and giving them power to do things. We don’t have to go full Chinese central committee on this but we can learn from countries such as France, where elite civil engineers spearhead grand projects, streamlining approvals, enforcing timelines and rewarding completion over perfection.
If it takes engineers, people who as kids may have been obsessed by train sets, to run the country for a few decades, so be it. These people are doers not talkers and now that Ireland seems unable to complete even the most basic infrastructural tasks, it is time for doers.
