breakneck

The policies tend to get ghastly when non-engineers try to implement what they see as "scientifically engineered" policies and don't understand the policy or the science.

Collect quotes from indoctrinated civil servants and you can put together a thoroughly alarmist text. It isn't as if the alarmist-book reading audience is all that knowledgeable.

You swallow all sorts of fatuous climate change denial propaganda and recycle it here. Now you seem to be recycling equally dubious propaganda about China's over-engineered and under-lawyered society.

You aren't going to be taken seriously about that either.

Read the book before you pontificate.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Note that most leaders of European companies hold PhDs in a technical subject, so it's not clear that engineering is the cause either way.

Joe

This non-observation almost certainly results from the fact that the early, and probably later, Chinese revolutionary figures and future leader class were all trained by the Soviets. The history of the USSR is a succession of failed scientifically engineered policies.

You recommended it. I don't need to bother.

Having a Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make you a good engineer. My work history put me in contact with a lot of colleagues who were Ph.D.s and good engineers, but also quite a few managers who had got Ph.D.s and were hopeless at engineering. Leading a company calls for different skills from getting a product to work. Getting a Ph.D. can call on those kinds of skills too.

China figured out individual liberties were bad for business.

Elon Musk figured out the same thing which is why he didn't build his fortune being a transgender rights activist and trying to make voting easier.

Incidentally "Engineer" is a prestige title in many non-Western cultures, like an MD or a JD or an MBA in the US. A ticket to the old boys club like getting a JD from Yale.

I'm unsure of how many chemical engineering patents Xi Jinping has filed same as I'm unsure of how familiar JD Vance is with the Constitution despite both of them having degrees in the respective fields.

The summary conclusion is:

"Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering"

The US government doesn't value individual liberties in any kind of general sense. In large part because a substantial minority of the US population whose instincts aligns with American's wealthiest people doesn't value them.

The US government "embraces engineering" just fine it just puts the bulk of its investment into projects with military applications vs. public works, and so has the most expensive and technologically sophisticated military on the planet, which it then applies in various bungling stupid ways to generally make the world a worse place than before it showed up.

Again this is so in large part because a substantial minority of the American population whose interests align with American's wealthiest people prefer it that way.

There's a distinction between development engineers - who can get patents - and administrative engineers, who keep projects coordinated.

They both have to understand much the same science, but they use that understanding in rather different ways.

I would guess that percentage of leaders that have engineering background is similar to percentage of engineering student amoung all students.

In communist era there was a discussion if my country has too many engineers. There was comparision with western countries and most had lower percentage of engineers among people with higher education. That I think missed significant point: most western countries outsourced a lot of manufacturing, so that they did not need production engineers (and part of design was outsourced too). At that time my country domestically produced most goods (about 95% was domestically produced and 5% imported), so needed production engineers. Comparison involved also Japan, where percentage of engineers was significantly higher than in typical western countries. I do not have relevant data but I would guess that at that time Japan were manufacturing a lot of things and outsorced a little (if any).

During recent trade tensions between US and China there was also talk about relocating production from China to other countries. It was argued that in short or even middle time this is impossible: China have plenty of experienced production engineers. They are not available in other countries.

The current top leadership of the PRC is almost all people educated as engineers. And all men.

China has a built-in demographic crisis, not to mention all the kids lying flat.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Pretty much every advanced industrial country has a demographic crisis. Populations need to halve to get us down to sustainable levels.

China's "one child" policy got them on the right track early, but their preference for having male children created a bigger mess than it needed to.

The control loop is under-damped, and it's not a subject where it is easy to encourage rational reactions.

The handwriting was on the wall 40 years ago for engineering and the applied sciences. Now it's the basic sciences. It's over for the west, China is the new dominant powerhouse.

See the objective data-based assessment for details:

"China surpasses US in research spending – the consequences extend far beyond scientific ranking and clout"

"China’s rapid rise in science has hit a milestone. The country’s investment in research and development has reached parity with – and by purchasing power measures has surpassed – that of the United States, according to a March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both nations have crossed the US$1 trillion threshold on research spending."

The existing population is sustainable, but we don't need 9 billion people. A gradual decline is probable. The US fertility rate is about

One child was brutal. Forced abortions and sterilization, infanticide, brutality.

And it was stupid, based on dumb linear extrapolation math, and on "The Population Bomb". Erlich ranks among history's mass murderers..

Prosperity and education reduce birth rates. The CCP should have realised that.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

At the moment. Fertility depends on decisions taken today. A different social environments is going to generate different decisions.

The Chinese regime is brutal. Their implementation of the one child policy was just as brutal as their implementation of al their other policy decisions.

Erlich was an alarmist author, of the kind whose books you recommend. Anybody taking him seriously was a gullible twit. Giving bad advice doesn't make you a mass murderer - if that were the case your enthusiasm for climate change denial propaganda wp\ould qualify you for death row.

They are doing that at the moment. They certainly didn't in the past, where rich families had lots of kids and could feed them well enough that more than half of them could survive to reproductive age.

Really? There weren't a lot of well documented examples around at the time, and the CCP wasn't into studying that kind of data.

You've got to spend the money in the right areas to get the results you are looking for.

A rigid hierarchical society isn't good at doing that. I met one really good Chinese mechanical engineer in the UK and he soon got head-hunted by a US firm with the offer of US citizenship quickly. He really didn't want to take his family back to China. US society is pretty rigidly structured by wealth, but if you get rich you can move up fairly quickly.

You won't read the book so you'll never know.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Europe is certainly in decline. I expect China to decline and the US to keep inventing things.

There's more to life than scientific papers and patents.

China crushes really creative people.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

China's hierarchy isn't all that rigid. For one thing, it's full of scandal, corruption, and incompetence, especially in the semiconductor sector. They get consistently low marks in "institutional" controls ( from UN's WIPO). "China’s weak institutional score is dragged down by low marks for regulatory quality and rule of law..." is one way to put it. The estimate of embezzlement and influence peddling, sabotaging their semiconductor industry, is cumulatively trillions $. Apparently, the death penalty isn't enough of a deterrent for some people.

A pricey analysis here, policymakers at highest level listen to these people, trends, not static stats, are the most important information: