Dan Wang

I think it's China.

I think China is a high agency, high tea society.

Once they decide to build this infrastructure, it comes out and it gleams.

Once California decides to build infrastructure, it's 17 years and it's going to be 20 years before anyone is able to get close to riding high-speed rail.

There's various ways to measure something like social trust in China by a lot of conventional measures, like you lose your wallet in the park nearby while someone returned it to you in China, that share is rather low.

But I was thinking of this definition of social trust from the scholar Francis Fukuyama that said that.

He said something like social trust is the measure of spontaneous coordination of people able to

get together quickly, make decisions quickly, and act quickly.

And at least in the early days of COVID, that's something that China really had, where manufacturers were working really well together, tech companies were making it really clear where the fever clinics were on the mapping services, and the government really stepped up in a big way as well.

And the US, at least in 2020, really did not do any of these sort of things.

The pros of the lawyerly society are a guarantee of my favorite value in America, which is pluralism.

that there is some measure of robust debate that is guaranteed in the US.

And one of the things that really thrills me about having moved back to the US over the last two and a half years now is that

There's just always energy among Americans to try to diagnose their problems and try to improve on them.

Two weeks ago, I went from New York to Washington, D.C.

to speak at the Abundance Conference in D.C., and that is just one strand of the recognition that America has lost a lot of crucial abilities to build homes, transit, all sorts of infrastructure, and we need to get a lot better.

I think that folks in New York and you're one of these rallying points are helping people to understand the world as it is a little bit better to really try to improve a lot of different things.

I am plugged into several conversations at the Hoover Institution and there's a tremendous sense that a lot of things in the U.S.

are not working and we need to get better.

The problem is that the U.S.