Compared with booming profits, rich-country workers have lost out, as Chinese factory workers, Indian software engineers and the spread of computer automation undermine bargaining power and wage growth.

ECONOMIST: Business is booming almost everywhere

David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys any job that can be reduced to a routine.

ECONOMIST: A university degree no longer confers financial security

This problem was solved by Dr Chua's collaborator, Tamas Roska, and his group at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

ECONOMIST: Analogue computing