I have a hard time seeing the discontinuity between the New Deal people you're referencing and the 1960s Great Society ones that pretty much iterated on the same themes of the scientific management of society through monolithic institutions with expansive powers.
It's pretty much relentless hubris with little to show and much to answer for.
I'm willing to change my mind. What sort of an ace in its hole does china have to change this situation?
The one child policy is 40 years old, China has been 4-2-1 for like 20 years at least, and no collapse has happened. Now they're allowing 2 children.
What's the specific thing that will collapse and be bad? An oversized retiree generation dying just frees up pension cash.
When people retire there is a sudden shift from investment to liquidation. That's a driving factor for popping asset bubbles, and china is currently one huge asset bubble.
Like it or not (i personally dont), we are also living in a world where the central planners rely on consumption-driven economics, and there just isn't a chinese consumer market anymore due to demographics.
The working population has been steady-state at 1-child for 40 years followed by 2-child for the last few years.
I suppose there could be some demand loss due to fewer people demanding things, but.. there's a lot of room for additional demand in China. Plenty of people where running water is a last-20-years nice new thing.
Or perhaps the question boils down to whether "on net" is the right objective function.
There's a lot of "quality of life" there that gets missed when people zoom all the way out and talk about state involvement, GDP and freedom.
I guess you'd have to ignore what Deidre McCloskey describes as the Great Enrichment of liberal democracies:
"[...] a rise in real wages 1800 to the present by a factor of 10 or 30 or (allowing for improved quality of goods) 100, which is to say 900 or 2,900 or 9,900 percent" [1]
Meanwhile there's a certain propensity for incredible inhumanity, eugenics (in the case of the 1920s Progressive movement) and the outright abuse and "reeducation" of minority races in China.
[1]: http://www.deirdremccloskey.org/docs/pdf/IndiaPaperMcCloskey...