There are two books this year that are being talked about more than any other, by an order of magnitude. One is Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The other is Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

The relationship between the United States and China is the most important issue in the world today, and Breakneck is the book everyone should read to understand this moment: Does America need to be more like a society of engineers, as China is, or a society of lawyers?

Dan is not a fly-by-nighter; rather, he spent seven years traveling throughout China, visiting and sampling every aspect of Chinese life he could—most of all its factories and manufacturing expertise.

I am pleased and honored to have known Dan for about 10 years. He and I have seen a Brahms concert together, and we have eaten together in Yunnan, China, where Dan was born.

An important new figure has arrived on the intellectual scene. You can sample his work with this excerpt from Breakneck. —Tyler Cowen

Americans today are rarely excited about major construction projects. This is in part because they’re associated with environmental damage, and in part because they take so long to complete.

It’s also because they’ve become so rare that people have forgotten how much they can improve lives.

Contrast this with China. Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after its economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis...