2026-02-27
23 分钟The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm your host, Jason Palmer.
Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
A horrific attack in western Nigeria earlier this month is just one sign of a troubling change.
Jihadist groups are splitting, leading to more violence between them,
and spreading ever closer to the country's urban centers, threatening violence for all.
And nobody ever gave Virginia Oliver any hassle for being a woman running a lobster boat.
No one dared.
We look back on a career spent working Maine's waters for nearly a century.
But first, your favorite economist and mine, John Maynard Keynes,
made one wild assertion back in 1930 in his essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren".
He does a potted history of humanity pointing out the incredible pace,
closer to his time, of what he keeps calling technical inventions and technical improvements.
They'd had huge impacts on workers' productivity.
He concludes that by 2030, we'd all be working 15-hour weeks.
I don't know about you, but four years out, and that still looks unlikely.
People love pointing out this folly of the great man, but let's take a broader lesson:
big technical improvements, like say artificial intelligence,
take maybe a little longer than you might think to have big economic outcomes.