Before we get to the strategy up to 2030, let me turn back the clock to 1930.
It was the depths of the Great Depression.
There was a lot of poverty in today's high income world
as well as in the poor countries, the developing world.
John Maynard Keynes, that great political economist of the 20th century,
wrote a wonderful essay, The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.
That's the one where Keynes noted that from
the time of the Roman Empire up until the 18th century,
the rate of technological progress had been extraordinarily low.
So low, in fact, that a peasant from the Roman Empire would have
felt at home in rural England in the early years of the 1700s.
But Keynes went on in that essay to note the explosion of technology of
the Industrial Revolution, and he drew in 1930, in the depths of
the Great Depression, a startling lesson from that technological progress.
Because, you could imagine in the Great Depression, with mass unemployment and
with the pessimism around, that one could have been overwhelmed,
feeling that economic progress was at an end.
But Keynes said no.