China’s autocratic society comes to life in Breakneck, the new book by Dan Wang. Nothing gets in the way of public works. Subways go through buildings. High-speed rail lines are built seemingly overnight. Industrial dominance in solar panels and electric cars is the result of deliberate policy.
 
Breakage is common. Top-down mandates can’t adapt to unforeseen circumstances and market realities. Cities of apartment buildings remain empty. One provincial czar had a kind of genius for idiotic mega-projects, including a giant ski resort in a place without snow.
 
What’s most breathtaking, to me, is the state’s intrusion into personal lives.

Maybe it’s me, but the news cycle seems both terrifying and tedious. We’re treated to a steady diet of crises followed by reactions which create new crises. It’s as if we’re in a straitjacket, bouncing off today’s emergency instead of making deliberate choices that might lead to a coherent future.

In a thoughtful New York Times column, Ben Rhodes explains how “short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.” He characterizes Trump as seeking “short-term ‘wins’ at the expense of the future”—for example, ignoring unsustainable national debt, climate change, and other existential perils. But Rhodes says Democrats too are trapped in short-termism—“spend[ing] more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place.”

Politics now has a dizzying quality. The roller-coaster of Trump policies―now we do this, now we do the opposite―is being matched by wild swings in the Democratic positions, led by socialist Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary. Just imagine, as liberal columnist Joe Klein mused, the staggering inefficiency of a municipal grocery store operating under union work rules: "Sorry, I only restock on Thursdays."

Centrist democrats are trying to mobilize an Abundance agenda to cut through red tape to build housing and infrastructure. That's a step in the right direction, but pruning the red tape jungle doesn't work by itself. Officials must have authority to make tradeoff judgments.