Dan Wang

is much more deliberative.

It thinks a lot about things.

Often it fails in some of these goals that it tries to do.

Something like the U.S.

couldn't possibly have achieved zero COVID because there was no possible enforcement mechanism to get people actually staying indoors and not going outside in big way.

So the US doesn't get stupid ideas like zero COVID, but it also doesn't get things that it says that it really wants to do, like California high-speed rail.

And so what I would say is that one of my conclusions, one of my new realizations after writing this book is that

Maybe there can be too much state capacity.

Maybe you don't want a state to be too efficient.

If the engineers are too efficient and they really decide to track society to go off track, they can go really off track before there's any course correction.

So you want the ideal level of state capacity.

That's much more than what the U.S.

has right now, but maybe a little bit less than what China has.

I would love to get to know a better company like Meituan, which again is one of these octopus-like conglomerates.

When I visited Meituan in Beijing in 2018, they told me, we have about 50 core business lines.

And we went, what?

How can you have 50 core business lines?

But I think they really meant it.

There's a lot of managers and they're really intent on making a lot of these different things work.

There is a great book about Huawei written about the company by my friend, Eva Do, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, now a reporter at the Washington Post called House of Huawei released earlier this year.