Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other

“China is ruled by the Communist Party that has studied 3 institutions in depth. First, the Catholic Church: How do you organize doctrine, claim to be thousands of years old, and have a figurehead that everyone is expected to worship? It is inflected with the Sicilian Mafia, which enforces its omerta throughout the entire organization. Second, Japan and how to avoid the economic malaise that plagued it after the 1980s. Third, the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping famously called Gorbachev an idiot.”— Dan Wang

History & Geopolitics · Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making

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Three institutional models combined create CCP structure

“When I was early in my writing, I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices.”— Dan Wang

Creativity & Innovation · Operations & Execution

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Copy masters to internalize their choices

“James C. Scott's most popular work, Seeing Like a State, is unfortunately his weakest work. It takes an extensively centralized view that he likes to criticize. James C. Scott's very best work is The Art of Not Being Governed, in which he did extensive fieldwork in Yunnan. Zomia is this major zone where people decided to hide out from the state.”— Dan Wang

History & Geopolitics · Culture & Society · Strategy & Decision Making

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Escape agriculture enables state avoidance

“I was a bad kid growing up. Ottawa is the drug capital of Canada. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much. My main issue was that I played hooky. My parents threatened to give me to the army and I laughed that off because no parents ever do that. But then my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and they straightened me out.”— Dan Wang

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Reframe hardest task as easiest then execute

“If I were a central planner, I would ask, well, what do data centers need? Well, they need a lot of electrical power, and the US has not invested enough in electrical power. This year alone, China will build about 300 gigawatts of solar, and the US is on track to build 30 gigawatts of solar. Right now, there's 33 nuclear power stations under construction in China. There's zero under construction in the US.”— Dan Wang

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution · Technology & Engineering

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Central planning identifies upstream constraints

“I am a regional thinker. I am twice an outsider. First, as someone from Southwest China, which is an economic backwater even today, hiding out from the state, hiding away from the imperial gaze from Beijing, as well as the excessive commercialism of Shanghai. I am much more skeptical of Beijing's power than someone who would just celebrate the grandeur. I am also an outsider in the United States by virtue of having grown up in Ottawa.”— Dan Wang

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Double outsider status enables dual critique

“Chinese to me are a super pragmatic people. You put an incentive in front of them and they will maximize everything out of it. By the time that we spoke to a nurse with an obviously Chinese accent, it was clear that she was the truth teller among all of the nurses in the system that was able to help us navigate, oh, this process is good, that other process is not so good.”— Dan Wang

Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Pragmatism means navigating around obstacles not complaining

“US healthcare is 17-something percent of American GDP. That's a lot. But if you only get that much happier moment to moment, but if you live longer, or you have better painkillers, or we can fix your broken hip, your life is a lot better. Why shouldn't it be eventually 30%, 35%? The US spends so much on so many things and gets so little that we have the Second Avenue subway costing something like 8 times per mile than Madrid and Paris.”— Tyler Cowen and Dan Wang

Economics & Markets · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Value of health spending exceeds conventional metrics

“50% of China's economy is pretty dysfunctional, but 5% is going splendidly well. When I became a technology analyst, my remit was to take a look at the top 5% of China's economy, and that is the area that goes from strength to strength. I would say that 50% of America's economy is also pretty dysfunctional. The problem, what you're telling us all, is that people need to get around and you're saying let them eat cars.”— Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen

Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making

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Focus on functional 5% not dysfunctional 50%

“I think of a good podcast as it being about the drama of the unfolding of the conversation. The audience wants to learn his way of thinking about things. And they will get something out of that. It will be real. It will be vivid. They might end up disagreeing with his very liberal Anglican American perspectives on history, but they'll have figured out what that perspective is. And you don't get that from GPT-5.”— Tyler Cowen

Philosophy & Reasoning · Technology & Engineering

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Individual perspective irreplaceable by AI consensus

“I think a lot about the Communist Party as a Leninist technocracy with grand opera characteristics. If you watch some of these proceedings from the party congresses, it really feels like watching a Wagnerian opera by other means. There's less noise but much greater drama. I wonder if we will ever have a good answer of what Hu Jintao was looking at and what he was objecting to and why Xi Jinping decided to humiliate an elder in that way.”— Dan Wang

Culture & Society · History & Geopolitics

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Political theater mirrors operatic dramaturgy

“For me, it's quite arbitrary and based on whim. I simply feel I need to start doing or continuing something. And there's no grand strategy or plan behind it. It's gone well for me. But that's endogenous. I suppose I trust my instincts. To have no grand strategy, but to always be able to pivot like that, that is still a grand strategy in itself. If there's a new thing it seems I can learn or should learn, I'll want to do it.”— Tyler Cowen and Dan Wang

Strategy & Decision Making · Philosophy & Reasoning

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No strategy is itself a strategy

“Something that I grapple with is how do you embrace some aspects of elite culture while also prizing running away from the state? A lot of elite culture is quite revolutionary. Mozart and Beethoven were revolutionaries in their time. Beethoven in particular, a classical liberal. Mozart, some kind of Freemason, which was also a classical liberal view. And there's something about the music that is quite life-affirming.”— Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen

Philosophy & Reasoning · Culture & Society

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Revolutionary artists create elite culture

“America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. But if we are taking a look at the broader set of suburban living, maybe it is more possible for people to take light rail into the city. I think there should be much better high-speed rail access between select locations, not necessarily everywhere, but what we call the Acela corridor from Boston down to D.C.”— Dan Wang

Operations & Execution · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets

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Optimal infrastructure depends on mobility mode hierarchy

“If you're designing a 10-day trip through Yunnan, you can go to Xishuangbanna in the south, my favorite corner of Yunnan. You have certain ethnic groups that essentially dwell within one mountain. It is where the Mekong River flows. It is tropical rainforest. You can get excellent mango, durian, tropical fruits. What I like to do is to just have a really big lunch, and then for dinner, I will buy a variety of tropical fruits.”— Dan Wang

Culture & Society

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North-south traverse maximizes diversity

“I am much more attracted to the pleasure center of China. Chengdu or Chongqing. Chongqing is the more cinematic city. I love how you can enter a building, go up 11 floors, and exit again street level because it is built through these gorges as well as mountainsides, and it feels like a city carved into cliffs. Chengdu feels a little bit too laid back. Yunnan has a province full of mountains, extraordinary climactic zones.”— Dan Wang

Culture & Society · History & Geopolitics

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Geographic constraints create distinctive culture

“Stendhal loved voluptuous excess like his hero, Rossini. The Barber of Seville, even early operas like The Italian Girl in Algiers or The Turk in Italy, they are so much fun to listen to. The final trio in Comte d'Orsay, which lasts about 10 minutes at the very end, is these voices encircling and entwining. I think it is one of the most beautiful parts of opera ever. This is something that I sometimes listen to on loop when I'm writing because there is just remarkable beauty.”— Dan Wang

Culture & Society · Creativity & Innovation

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Loop great art during creative work

“One difference between us, I enjoy seeing Chinese tourists. For me, it's novel. For you, you're trying to avoid it. Part of the reason that I'm so into some of these tribes is that within my family lore, there's speculation that through one of my grandmothers whose origins are cheerfully unknown, that we have Tibetan heritage through her or Hua heritage through her.”— Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen

Culture & Society · Psychology & Behavior

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Uncertain heritage shapes cultural attraction