IMO not so much as "where are we" as "where are they", west was always going to have reckon with competing with PRC who is on trend to add more STEM than OECD c

IMO not so much as "where are we" as "where are they", west was always going to have reckon with competing with PRC who is on trend to add more STEM than OECD combined or US adds new people. And eventually this will apply to India as well. Arrogance doesn't help, but at some point reality of high value regressing to mean because magnitude more smart brains is involuting the margins out of everything. PRC competitors likely also getting creamed by deepseek as well. The running joke in China is when China does something advanced, that thing is no longer considered advanced since China very good at driving costs to nothing and commodizing advanced into common which ironically hurts PRC from getting into the true high value game.