Chips down for EU as Asia seizes microchip advantage — Part 1

Microchip manufacturing via Wall Street Journal

Microchips/ semiconductors are ubiquitous in the modern world and an electric car can have more than 3,000 of them. Thousands of people in Sweden have got chip implants but there are downsides. About a trillion chips are made a year, or 128 for every person on the planet. The annual sales value in 2021 is projected at $450bn according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) — down from $469bn in 2018.

Populist elite resentment and contempt in age of instability

An occupational therapist (right) became a US Capitol insurrectionist, Jan 6, 2021

In April 1932, Franklin D Roosevelt, governor of New York and presidential election candidate, in a radio address said: “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

Optimism vs. Pessimism: "You've never had it so good"

The first chart here is from JP Morgan, the American bank, and the second is from Bank of America. The spacing of increments on the x-axis varies because of missing data. Asia accounted for about three-fourths of global output (measured in gross domestic product) from the start of the common era. By 1860 it had been overtaken by the industrial revolution in Europe and America. The western economies peaked at about 1950 when they accounted for four-fifths of global output.

Our African ancestors had to be pessimists to survive and in modern times people tend to be more optimistic about their own lives than that of their society or country. However, pessimism is widespread in particular in Europe and the United States despite the stunning advances in the material standard of living and well-being in rich countries, and in recent decades many regions of the world.