Hello Swampians, it’s Jonathan Derbyshire here, the FT’s US opinion editor, standing in for Ed, who returns next week after a well-earned vacation (plus an appearance at Saturday’s FT Weekend festival in London; in-person and digital tickets are still available).
One of the books everyone is talking about here in the US at the moment is Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (reviewed recently in the FT by my colleague John Thornhill). Wang’s thesis is simply stated. “China is an engineering state,” he writes, “building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.” (You may detect a bit of an echo in that characterisation of the US of another of the year’s most discussed books, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which trades on the idea that sclerotic regulation and planning blight are stifling America’s growth potential.)