China 1984 Hangzhou drainage ditch labor observation

Engineering decisions depend on local constraints. The "obvious" American move (buy a backhoe) fails on diesel-fuel cost and on the social cost of unemployed labor. Used to set up the lecture's thesis that engineering is context-dependent problem-solving.

In 1984, for the first time, I was going to a conference in Hangzhou, China. I flew into Shanghai and took the train. We got to Hangzhou and we were riding the bus to the hotel, and they were putting drainage ditches in all the streets — the whole city, all at once. That's the way the Chinese do things. They don't do it halfway. We're going to do it, we're going to do the whole city, all at once. You don't do it in pieces. And they were all doing it with shovels. These were five-foot-deep ditches, with great big concrete bricks to put in drainage ditches for the rains.