Works in Progress

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Stephen Kotkin is one of the great historians of Eurasia. In a new series for Works in Progress, he tackles the biggest question of them all: what went wrong between America and China? In the first part, he explains why we shouldn’t expect China to go the way of the Soviet Union. Beijing’s leaders have internalized the obvious lesson from Moscow: No Gorbachev. But they have also done something subtler: fix the incentives that made Soviet elites think that they had something to gain from ending communism. worksinprogress.co/issue/sov…

Big thanks to @lennysan for featuring WIP in this year’s holiday gift guide, which remains (objectively and without any bias whatsoever) the best in the business.

Sent in by one of our readers from the Union Square Barnes & Noble!

We’re delighted to announce that @danwwang is making his debut as a contributor, with a column for this issue of @WorksInProgress. worksinprogress.co/issue/sic… Few people understand the China–US contrast as well as Dan Wang, and fewer still write about it with so much talent. His book Breackneck has introduced the now famous meme of China as a “country of engineers” and United States as a “country of lawyers,” to explain the differences in building capacity and physical world stagnation we are seeing between the two polities. In his new column for us, he takes up one specific thread in the long-running debate over how China and the US compare and argues that both owe part of their power to being polycentric. One observation is that both the American and US capitals are not their biggest cities. Vienna, London, Seoul and Paris dwarf their countries’ second cities, by four to seven times. By contrast, Beijing isn’t China’s largest city, and DC isn’t even in the top five in the US. Does this make US and China lame, for having smol capitals? No! On the contrary, Dan thinks that this friction between political and economic centers is important and at least partially explains why both countries can combine dynamism with strong states. But the two countries are polycentric in very different ways. China’s regions are culturally distinct and are shaped heavily by geography. While coastal provinces tend to look outward, mountain areas like Sichuan and Chongqing are characterized by evading the center’s edicts. Dan also points out some misconceptions: yes, China has central control, but it is weaker than it look. Local officials often ignore or quietly subvert senseless directives from Beijing, with enforcement thinning out quickly beyond the big cities. The characteristic feature of American polycentrism is how well it sorts people into domains and “sends” them to specific cities: this is reminiscent of the point @patio11 has made around “The Sort.” In America, the smartest and most driven tend to cluster in a handful of cities, above all New York and San Francisco, with Washington and Boston are slightly behind them. More than this: each field has an obvious center: AI has its capital in SF, for policy and politics you have DC, for finance New York and for biotech Boston and more recently, SF. Different cities in America also prize different things: Miami values looking good, Boston being intelligent and bookish, LA how famous you are and New York how rich you are. There is so much variety in terms of who you can choose to become in America. And the city you decide to live in might end up shaping who you are, moreso than in any other country!

Works in Progress has deep British roots. We think our origins explain much about our character and the specific ways in which we care about ideas. A less British WiP would not be WiP. A unique culture and intellectual environment that it gan gift to the world is just one of the reasons why we want the British civilization to prosper. But civilizations need multiple elements to preserve themselves, and one of those elements is material prosperity and economic growth: these are the basis of everything else. Without them, it's hard to achieve higher-order human flourishing. We are excited to organize this event with @LSEnews, on how Britain can maximally take advantage of the AI revolution. It's late, but hopefully not too late!

They say that AI is going to reduce the rewards to being intelligent. This is not true... yet. At WiP at least, we want intelligent, well-informed and original people to write for us. The reward? What was once the purview of Kings: exquisite illustration of your thoughts. You basically get our Design Team, led by the marvellous @AtalantaArdenM to do a pesonalized illustration of the deepest corners of your brain, immortalised for posterity.

At Works In Progress we are always looking for new writers with smart, fresh takes the world needs to hear. Could you be one of them? We publish longreads on tech, policy, economics, architecture, culture, and all sorts of things. If you write for us your work will be printed in our beautiful magazine, read by many of the world's most interesting people. We also pay well. Here are some examples of the sort of articles we would love to commission: - Why isn't there more semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley? - Fifteen years ago, CRISPR was an incredibly promising new medical technology. What has happened to all the CRISPR drugs? - Japan was once the stock example of a low-fertility country, but it has staved off further decline as other East Asian countries have plummeted past it. How? - Poland has had exceptional post-communism economic growth, and is on track to overtake Britain in wealth per capita in 2030. What caused the Polish economic miracle? If you have an idea for something you think is the sort of thing we would publish - or the sort of thing we *should* be publishing - please get in touch, or send a pitch to pitches@worksinprogress.co.