fun in the mausoleum

directors cuts & bits & pieces

For anyone who missed it, my joint review of “Abundance” plus “Breakneck” is up on the Niskanen Center blog. Below are a few more thoughts from the cutting room floor with respect to “Breakneck” – I also have some odds and ends I didn’t say about Abundance, but they are a bit more “Discoursey” so might need a bit more editing for public consumption.

As I mention in the review, Dan Wang hardly discusses Europe at all in “Breakneck”; in the introduction he says that “Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practice”. (As I also say in the review, one of the things that makes it such a fantastic read is that he’s prepared to drop bombs like this all the way through, I’m really jealous of the way he keeps the story rattling along). But he continues to basically treat Europe throughout the book as just a more extreme case of what ails America (except maybe a bit better at building transport infrastructure). This is an intentional choice on Dan’s part – he doesn’t have much to say about Japan or Canada either, because he wants to concentrate on the two poles of the “engineering state” and “lawyerly society”. So, in the words of the book, America and China

“are not the only two countries in the world that matter. Far from it. But … [DD summarises: they kind of are]”

I find myself wanting to put up at least a partial defense of Europe. Because in my view, it’s not really a mausoleum; it’s more like a rather nice, comfortable retirement home. I joked to Dan in email that the real distinction he ought to have made was between the “fucking around state” and the “finding out society”; one pole of activity in constructing things for the sake of doing so, and the other in trying to prevent bad consequences.

The continent of Europe, in that model, has less enthusiasm for fucking about, because it has already found out so much. Its system is more driven by contentment and luxury than either creating or dividing the spoils of progress. The word “luxury”, in fact, only appears three times in my Kindle search, two of which are describing how great it was to get good bread and crayfish salad during the pandemic. But out of the top ten most valuable companies in Europe, two of them (LVMH and Hermes) are luxury goods, and a third (L’Oreal) is in the same space of charging very high prices for commodities because you’ve created a nice feeling about them. In fact, there’s only one US company (RH) in the top ten luxury manufacturers in the world, despite the fact that the USA and China are the biggest markets by quite a long way.

Lux goods interest me, because of course they’re the ultimate expression over the long term of “process knowledge”. But as well as luxuries for the very rich, Europe is, famously, somewhat better at providing comforts for the middle class and at decent amenities even for the poor. A joke that I only just managed to shoehorn into the end of the review is that “Breakneck” is a very appropriate title for a book comparing China and America, because an important thing that these two systems have in common with one another is that, to a quite surprising extent, they seem to kill people a lot. It’s not possible to say everything in every book (the complete absence of anything about power from “The Unaccountability Machine” still stings me when people point it out), but to the extent that Breakneck engages with inequality, it’s to say that nothing can be done without even more development of the physical world, and Europe seems like a counterexample of that to me.

Toward the end of the book, Dan talks about a piece of Communist Party propaganda which reads “China will always be a developing country”:

“I find that beautiful.

“This declaration is part of a cynical diplomatic effort to convince the poorer countries of the world that China stands for their interests. That’s not the appeal for me. Rather, I think it is wise for the country to declare that it is “developing”. The United States should do that too. Isn’t it better than to be a “developed” one, which implies that you’re done, finished, at the end of the road? Leave “developed” status, I say, to Europe’s beautiful mausoleum economy.

I think this is a worthy challenge to Europe. But there’s part of me which wants to reverse it and say – isn’t it also a challenge from Europe, to ask both the engineering state and the lawyerly society something like “what are you actually trying to get out of all this development? Why is it always jam tomorrow, and why is the bread that you’re eating with the jam so bloody awful?”. Putting aside questions of what I referred to in the review (and will come back to) as “Degrowth Abundance” and the need to take environmental debt as seriously as financial debt, there is a need to take seriously the challenge of the present against the future; is the consumption and leisure deferred actually worth it.

Rory Sutherland has a really thought-provoking comedy bit, which is somewhat at right angles to Dan’s distinction between the engineering state and the lawyerly society, but which I think is interesting in context. He usually makes this point when trying to ask why the government employs lots of lawyers, and lots of economists, but hardly any marketing professionals:

In government, it seems like they have two ways of getting someone to do something. You can either force them, or you can bribe them. Law, or economics. But actually, there’s a third way, which is what most people usually do most of the time in their ordinary life. If you want someone to do something, before you start thinking of ways to force them, or how much it will cost to bribe them … why don’t you at least try just asking nicely?