The urgency of this effort is impossible to overstate. Every one of the factors squeezing the unhappy middle-income household, or the young person who is worse off than their parents, is accelerating. Japan-style economic stagnation is spreading to other economies, particularly in Europe. The huge numbers around the world who aspire to move to richer nations is growing rapidly.

Above all, the pace of technological change seems set to jump into a faster gear with the arrival of artificial intelligence – computers which learn as they go along, and have the potential to disrupt or make redundant the jobs, training and qualifications of hundreds of millions of people. One assessment is that we are on the brink of change happening at 10 times the speed and with 300 times the scope of the Industrial Revolution itself.

More livelihoods are going to be upset, more professions transformed, more skills made obsolete and more new ones required than ever before in the history of the human race. From the car that drives itself to the robot that provides a company’s security and audits its accounts at the same time, new devices are going to present not just an important scientific event but a transformational political one too.