“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” said the former American baseball player, Yogi Berra. The old catcher’s cheeky warning aside, let me offer three. They are as close to sure bets as can be.
Nuclear’s Return
The late Intel CEO, Andrew Grove, said he was lucky to have chosen semiconductors over nuclear power as his life’s work. Born in Hungary, Grove escaped his Soviet-occupied land to America, where he got his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. The civilian nuclear industry was young and glamorous. It attracted many of the smartest physicists and chemical engineers on earth. Integrated circuits weren’t even a thing until 1958.
Despite nuclear’s promise, the hype faded. Nuclear lost the public’s trust and today supplies only 4% of the global energy mix and 10% of its electricity. But now nuclear is again in fashion. The drive for more carbon-neutral economies, combined with a surge in demand from AI-class data centers and EVs, spells a far greater role for nuclear in the coming decades. Think of nuclear as coal’s replacement for baseload electricity. Today coal is 26% of the mix. Nuclear has much room to grow.
Robotics Powerhouse
China’s manufacturing and export push has puzzled outsiders, since the world has reacted not with checkbooks, but skepticism and tariffs. Why is China furiously making what the world may not want? Several possibilities. One is to keep people employed following the real estate bust and post-Covid slowdown. Another is to wait out the skeptics who will eventually want, China thinks, $10,000 EVs. A third possibility is to build a world-class manufacturing base to support a strong military. Or maybe it’s just the quest for global comparative advantage: “China wants to be the Amazon of countries—Amazon is the everything store, China wants to be the ‘make everything’ country,” according to Damien Ma of U.S. think tank MacroPolo. “The vision is to bring a complete supply chain to China.”
Whatever its reasons, China’s labor shortages are sure to rise. The country is rapidly aging while births have plummeted. The highly educated refuse to work in factories. Hence, China will have to press full-speed on robotics. Put another way, China can’t grow its economy without robotics. The world’s robotics boom will be centered in China.
Cultural Autonomy
India’s recent election, a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the EU’s parliamentary elections in June, a turn to the right, surprised most media commentators. The results shouldn’t have. Around the world, the masses are revolting against the elites. The media, eager to paint these results in the worst light, labels it right-wing populism with a whiff of fascism. It’s more accurate to call this trend a voter wish for greater cultural autonomy.
In America, Donald Trump’s oddly enduring appeal is based in non-coastal states, midsize and small cities, and outer suburbs of large cities. Most citizens in these parts are neither poor nor uneducated. They do feel subjugated by large media, government bureaucracies and the courts.
Unlike past populist revolts, this one—seen everywhere in the world—is not solely about economics. It is also about culture. Turns out most people hate losing their culture and living as the media or a bossy neighbor tells them to live. Life as a small business operator in a highly regulated place (think a restaurant owner in New York City or a potato grower in the Netherlands) is akin to death by compliance forms. This global revolt of the masses will not end soon. And when it does, let’s hope violence played no role in it.
