Keynes for our times

Resumo

Artificial intelligence has a penchant for pronouncements that are clear, confident and often wrong. More than a passing technical flaw, this speaks to the difficulty we all – including AI’s human architects – face in dealing with uncertainty. John Maynard Keynes, in contrast, understood that the future is essentially unknowable, and it is “better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” This insight remade economics in the 20th century, and it is but one of his ideas that are even more relevant in our own extremely uncertain times. To understand Keynes’s importance today, we go back to his original genius, see how observation and philosophy informed his flexible economic models, and then apply his insights to the problems of 2026.