Knock on wood: why trade and brand will trump tech in the advanced bioeconomy

But now we see mobility increasingly impacting the physical world. Trade has always been a mainstay of advanced civilization, but never more than now.

We see physical mobility and the problem of national borders, languages, cultures and systems crashing against each other.

We see it in the Brexit campaign and in the US elections, where immigration is a huge underlying issue. We see controversy over major trade deals. We have Brexit, yes, but Grexit too — the problem of bringing weaker countries or regions into a single currency without bringing their system of governance under a single authority. It is mobility of people, physical materials and capital that is dominating our headlines.