Microchips are generating plenty of drama these days: extramarital affairs, geopolitical intrigue, plunging stock prices, leadership transitions. But perhaps we should step away from the news cycle for a moment and look at the tiny protagonist beneath all that human drama: the microchip itself.
Last month, The New Yorker published a brilliant essay by Gideon Lewis-Kraus titled “Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made.” He opens by comparing the semiconductor supply chain to some of humanity’s greatest achievements: the pyramids of Giza, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Roman aqueducts.
At first, this sounds ridiculous. A microchip is little more than a sandwich of metal and refined sand. It hardly seems epic. But as Lewis-Kraus shows, the epic proportions are there, only in miniature:
Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg—each reduced to approximately the bulk of a hemoglobin molecule, or the distance grown by a human fingernail every five seconds. If a chip were merely a sculpture, this chiselling would represent a considerable achievement. But a chip is, in fact, a functional city for a population of busy electrons. They buzz about, flying our airplanes, powering the stock market, and, increasingly, thinking on our behalf. Unlike rockets, which are produced in relatively meagre quantities, microchips are stamped out by the billion. This is the most impressive thing about them. Or, maybe, about us.
The piece then guides the reader up the supply chain that builds these incredible technologies, inviting us to admire the lasers and mirrors of surreal precision, the thousands of production steps carried out in rooms cleaner than any hospital operating room and the network of human capital that must constantly reassemble itself as engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs keep pace with this dynamic industry.
If there were only one microchip in the world, we would place it behind glass in a great museum, charge admission, and travel across continents to admire it. Instead, we manufacture billions of them every day. The most astonishing fact about modern civilization is not the scale of the wonders we can make, but the scalability of how we make them. We have learned to make miracles affordable.
Consider Gordon Moore’s famous observation that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years. He once imagined that if cars had improved as quickly as semiconductors, we would be driving at 100,000 miles per hour and getting 50,000 miles to the gallon. Progress would come so fast and so cheaply that upgrades would seem almost free. As he joked, “We would find it cheaper to throw away our Rolls-Royce and replace it than to park it downtown for the evening.”
That is less hyperbolic than it sounds. As a kid, I spent countless hours playing Civilization. One of the great milestones in the game was completing the Apollo Program. Sending your people to the Moon was the ultimate demonstration of what a civilization could accomplish. Today, as Lewis-Kraus writes:
The phone in your pocket is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the computers used for the Apollo mission. One AirPod could easily calculate a path to the moon. A car-key fob would suffice. An electric toothbrush. There are Rolls-Royces that we do, in fact, routinely throw away. The Apollo mission’s chips were less powerful than those currently inside a digital pregnancy test. We squander moon-landing capability to display a plus sign.
Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” essay opens with a line from G.K. Chesterton: “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” We have learned to admire the natural world. Teachers take students to see mountains and forests, waterfalls and the starry night sky. We also understand that education should be an invitation to contemplate the extraordinary complexity of living things and the infinite scale of the universe.
But what about the human-made world? Too often, we only notice the hidden machinery beneath modern life when it breaks down, as this age of AI-powered hacking keeps reminding us. Who teaches children to marvel at the electrical grid? At the global logistics network that puts fresh produce on supermarket shelves? At clean running water coming from our taps? At factories that produce clothing that was once an unimaginable luxury, even for royalty, and is now affordable to nearly everyone?
When schools teach students about industrialization, teachers often emphasize pollution or the abhorrent labor conditions of early factories and of manufacturing in poor countries today. Even when they point to the upside of the Industrial Revolution, they tend to frame technological change in terms of productivity, investment, and lines going up on a PowerPoint slide. This matters, but so does teaching the next generation to admire what modern economies accomplish.
I think this feels paradoxical at some level because it mixes two movements that have, intuitively and historically, moved in opposite directions. Romanticism came about largely as a reaction to incipient technological and scientific modernity. The philosophy and art that gave it shape took their inspiration from nature and emotion, in contrast to the cold machinery of the modern world.
We need to turn that same romantic sensibility back toward the machinery itself. We need poets of the semiconductor and artists of industrial civilization. We need storytellers who can make the ordinary products of human ingenuity feel extraordinary again.
One of the best examples of this kind of storytelling came from the late Hans Rosling. In his wonderful TED talk “The Magic Washing Machine,” Rosling recalls being four years old when his mother loaded a washing machine for the first time.
His grandmother had spent her life heating water over firewood and washing clothes by hand for seven children. When the family finally bought a washing machine, she sat down in front of it and watched an entire wash cycle. “She was mesmerized,” Rosling said. “To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.” That same day, his mother explained the magic to him: “The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.”
What came out of the washing machine? Books. Education. Literature. The machine freed a mother’s time so she could read to her children and pursue an intellectual life of her own. Thin economics sees the machine as a labor-saving appliance. Thick economics sees it as a device for expanding human possibility. Rosling ends his talk with deep appreciation for the world that gave his family the washing machine: “Thank you, industrialization. Thank you, steel mill. Thank you, power station.”
The spirit behind The New Yorker’s microchip and Rosling’s washing machine is the romance economic education needs to recover. Economics is the science of scarcity and trade-offs, but it is also the science of how humanity overcomes scarcity: how millions of strangers cooperate to create together what none of them could create alone.
A student who learns economics through models but learns modern history as a series of problems might grow up to become a critic of his civilization. If instead he learns to be simply passive before modernity, he might become complacent and lack the understanding needed for reform. What he needs is to understand that the world was much worse, that it got much better, and that it should still get much better. It is the student who discovers how extraordinary modern economies are who will aspire to join the vast network of cooperation that can not only sustain them but improve them.
Our sense of wonder toward modern civilization should not stop at the extraordinary things we have built. The real marvel is that we have made the extraordinary ordinary. Perhaps the first task of economic education is to make it extraordinary again.
