
If Keynes were alive today, he would probably relish navigating the intellectual and political minefield that is Brexit. However, it is unlikely he would have supported it in the first place. Keynes often warned of the dangers of sacrificing present well-being for an uncertain future. “Our power of prediction is so slight, it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present evil for a doubtful advantage in the future”, wrote Keynes at age 21 in “The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke” in 1904.
Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them — and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system. (This is so key that we have a bunch of entire job ladders — PM’s and UX’ers and so on — who have d…