Inspiring WSJ story on automation improving women’s lives in rural Mali.
Not only is the peanut butter better — and Mrs. Doumbia’s selling easier — so is the quality of life in the 300 Mali villages that have the machine. Girls who were kept home to help with the domestic work from dawn to dusk are now going to school. Mothers and grandmothers who would have spent a lifetime pounding and grinding now have the free time to take literacy courses and start up small businesses, or to expand family farming plots and nurture a cash crop such as rice.
They have dubbed the durable, uncomplaining machine “the daughter-in-law who doesn’t speak.”
This is the simplest, best description I’ve ever seen on explaining why productivity improvements (which can often be socially wrenching) are the only way to improve the standard of living.
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