A New Decision-making Process
[2025 ended as a year many would just as soon forget, unless the U.S. stock market was your single benchmark. As the backlog of critical needs was building, I followed a series of authors in search of course corrections. One chain of thought that received some traction came to be known as the Abundance Movement. Starting with a book titled Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I followed how other authors responded to the book, and what history and current events had to say relevant to the debate. The result is a series of eight essays that will be posted to Fifty Year Perspective weekly through January and February. Here the fifth of eight parts.]
The explosion of rights described in the previous blog post opened the discussion for a new decision-making process. In August 2025, Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, published a book titled Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, comparing infrastructure development in the United States and China. His analysis: “The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up mostly of lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up mostly of engineers, that excels at construction.”
China’s government pays little regard or respect for individual rights. It has limited tolerance for citizens who challenge its authority. Americans fought against environmental degradation and incursion of highways in stable neighborhoods by adding layers of regulation and challenging proposals in court. Although the U.S. is not likely to adopt China’s practices. Wang advises the unwinding of the dominance of lawyers in our approval procedures in a renewal of “our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.”
Best-selling author Philip K. Howard in his 2025 book Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America, echoes Dan Wang and Marc Dunkelman in calling for a legal framework that empowers established, authoritative officials to make choices between opposing views, “replacing balkanized approvals by multiple levels of government with one decision-making hierarchy” weighing benefits and harms.
New York Times journalist Michael Kimmelman addressed the barriers that regulations and red tape pose against countless developments in a December 11, 2025, article, America Wants to Build Again. He reminds us that construction of the interstate highway system displaced more than a million Americans. The laws, regulations and stopgaps put in place in the 1960s and 1970s were to check the top-down, centralized authority that was employed to complete large projects. “Deregulation,” Kimmelman warns, “leads to more top-down authority…. But who exactly would be in charge?”