How do we reach universal prosperity by 2100?

In this episode of the Century of Plenty podcast, Sven Smit, Chris Bradley, Nick Leung, and Marc Canal discuss the ideas behind their new book, A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come. They reflect on the extraordinary gains in prosperity over the past century, challenge today’s prevailing pessimism about growth, and explore what it would take to create a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive world by 2100.

In this episode, the authors discuss:

• Why the past century’s sixfold increase in global prosperity provides reason for optimism about the future, and why today’s pessimism may overlook the lessons of history.
• How AI, energy, productivity, and innovation could enable billions more people to reach an “empowerment” standard of living while addressing climate change and resource constraints.
• Why growth and inclusion should go hand in hand, and how affordability, inequality, and a renewed willingness to build will shape the next century of progress.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Imagining a world of plenty

Nick Leung: Welcome, everyone. This is the podcast for A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come, our book, which we’ve written with some other friends from the McKinsey Global Institute.

Sven, are you going to kick us off with some imagining?

Sven Smit: I’d like the audience to start imagining. Imagine the history of your family. Go back to your great-grandparents, your grandparents, your parents, and yourself as a youth. Imagine where they were during the Great Depression. Imagine where they were during the wars. Imagine where they were in the 1970s when there was an oil crisis and the Cold War was at its peak. Imagine their house prices, whether they had food or not. Imagine all of that and compare it to today. Are we sure today is not better than that past?

I’m quite convinced it is, but it helps to imagine the past.

We’d also like you to imagine the future. Let’s start by imagining a country where there’s broad prosperity—say, an $80,000 GDP per capita. In this country, the energy is clean, the trains run on time, people trust the government, people trust each other. It’s Switzerland. We imagine that by 2100, the entire world—from Burundi to India to Brazil to the United States—has reached a minimum standard of living that’s as good as Switzerland today. You might choose another favorite country, but just imagine that by 2100 we’ve reached that point.

The rest of our debate today is going to be about whether this is possible and, if so, how.

Beliefs about growth

Chris Bradley: The thing I find interesting about that positive vision of the future is that it’s a totally countercultural thing to say. When you look at all the survey results, in my country [Australia] at least, only about 17 percent of people think the next generation is going to be better off than this one. In this book, we asked ourselves, how do we think through that? What are the prevailing beliefs we need to engage with?

One belief is that growth isn’t good, that it’s destroying the planet, creating inequality, and causing all these problems. Another is that growth isn’t possible, that we’ve reached our limits, that there isn’t enough to keep growing. But maybe the most personal belief is that growth isn’t for me—that I’m not included in growth. Growth is something that happens to someone else. Maybe older people get rich, or younger people don’t.

So we took on those questions: Is growth good? Is it possible? And can it be achieved in an inclusive way for everybody? That became the mission of the book.

Marc Canal: You talked about Australia, Chris, but when we look at almost any advanced economy, we see the same pattern. In France, only 9 percent of people think future generations will be better off than today. In Germany it’s 14 percent.

What’s interesting is that in China it’s close to 70 percent, so it’s almost the opposite. That’s a puzzling finding that we didn’t explore too deeply in the book. Nick, do you have any insights into why that happens?

Nick Leung: A lot of it is obviously tied to China’s recent growth. It’s even higher in India. What you see is a difference between mature, developed markets, where there’s more pessimism about the future, and places where more has been built more recently. People there tend to be more optimistic because they can see that progress is possible.

Misremembering the past?

Sven Smit: You’re talking about our memory of history. My daughter sent me a clip about whether the past was really better. The person in the video makes an interesting point: Our memories are much stronger for positive events than negative ones. We develop a biased view of history because we tend to blank out the bad parts. That’s one of the reasons I asked you to imagine your great-grandparents. The 1930s were not that great, but our minds often block out the difficult realities of the past.

Chris Bradley: Part of it is the music, Sven. The music really was better in the ’60s.

Sven Smit: Yeah, yeah.

Nick Leung: That’s classic nostalgia, Chris. Nostalgia is very powerful.

Chris Bradley: We’re trying to create nostalgia for the future here.

Marc Canal: It may feel strange because it’s almost like we’re looking at the negative side of the past, which isn’t a pleasant exercise. But I think it illustrates just how much we’ve progressed. Over the last 100 years, GDP per capita increased sixfold. That was completely unprecedented compared with any other 100-year period in the roughly 300,000 years of human history since the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Measures of progress

Marc Canal: As an economist, I know people say, “GDP? I don’t eat GDP. What’s GDP for?” It’s just a concept economists use. But the reality is that almost everything else we care about improved alongside GDP. Life expectancy increased by 30 to 40 years. Extreme poverty fell from around 60 percent to under 10 percent today. Almost everything we value is positively correlated with GDP, perhaps with the exception of inequality, which is more complicated and something we can discuss later. When you look at the facts, you see extraordinary progress over the last century that we tend to underestimate.

Sven Smit: The sixfold increase in growth wasn’t linear. Over the last 100 years, we’ve had the Second World War, the Great Depression, the oil crises of the 1970s, the dot-com crash, and the global financial crisis, just to name a few.

Our perception of progress is interrupted by these major events, which create uncertainty. I agree with you, Marc. GDP is just one measure, but almost every related measure shows positive progress. Still, we shouldn’t pretend it was easy. Progress was nonlinear, and society had to make enormous leaps across very deep chasms to achieve that sixfold increase.

Chris Bradley: We really like the work of Hans Rosling and talked about it a lot in the book. He describes the fourth level of human development as a good life, roughly $32 a day. Today, there are 55 times more people living at that level than there were 100 years ago. That’s remarkable.

There was one paragraph in the book that really struck me. In the 1920s, two of the most powerful men in the world—US President Calvin Coolidge and future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill—both lost young children to what today would be considered trivial infections. One died from a throat infection, another from an infected toe after a tennis injury.

Today, those problems can often be solved with a pill that costs only a few cents. Back then, they devastated the families of some of the most powerful people on Earth.

Even in my own family, my grandfather lost a brother to pneumonia because they simply couldn’t get medicine. GDP matters, but it’s really these human stories—and all the things that correlate with GDP—that make the point.

Entering a new era

Sven Smit: Many of the things that helped us over the last 30 years are now being questioned. We benefited from globalization, favorable demographics, cheap money, abundant resources, and a growing economy. Even though we worried about the planet, the overall system seemed to work.

Today, globalization is changing. Technology is no longer just digital. It’s about AI. AI could be incredibly beneficial, but it also introduces new risks. Demographics are no longer providing the same tailwind. We have questions about whether we’ll have enough energy to power AI and whether we can do it cleanly. Where is the cheap money now?

We’re suggesting that the world has gone through four distinct eras over the last century. The uncertainty we feel today is because we’re standing at the beginning of another one.

Chris Bradley: Nick, you mentioned acceleration. [Economist] Noah Smith recently made an interesting point. The people building the world during that earlier period—our grandparents’ generation—had no idea what was coming. They didn’t know the global economy would become 24 times larger, with four times the population and six times the income. Nobody predicted that. They lived through world wars and the Great Depression without realizing they were entering one of the greatest periods of economic growth in human history.

Maybe today we’re in the same position. We don’t know what comes next. But they kept building anyway. One of our central arguments is that we’ve made enormous progress, but according to the measures we use at MGI, we’re only about halfway toward empowering the world. Our message is: Don’t get off the train halfway through the tunnel. Can we finish the journey?

Sven Smit: There’s a concept I really like called the Overton window. Society’s conversation takes place within a relatively narrow window, but that window can shift and expand. Looking at the lessons of the past can give us some confidence. So, how was progress achieved?

Progress came from a system with many interconnected parts. You could think of it as a machine with eight cylinders. We had more workers. Female labor force participation increased, allowing society to accomplish more. Workers had better tools—what economists call capital. We became smarter as a knowledge economy, developing new manufacturing techniques and new ideas. People increasingly lived in cities, which foster collaboration and productivity.

All of those elements supported sixfold growth. I won’t go through every cylinder, but understanding the machine that drove progress helps us think about where we might be heading.

Powering productivity

Marc Canal: Absolutely. It also helps us understand which parts of that machine need improvement today. It’s no longer firing on all cylinders, and different cylinders have mattered at different times.

One example is workers. Several important trends came together over the last century. As Sven said, more women entered the formal labor force, providing a huge boost to economic growth and all the positive outcomes we’ve discussed. People also moved from farms to factories and then into services and knowledge industries. That massive structural shift dramatically increased productivity. At the same time, demographics were favorable. Birth rates were initially high and then gradually declined, creating a very advantageous age structure.

Today, however, those trends are changing.

Chris Bradley: We had a glut of working-age people.

Marc Canal: Exactly. Today we’re moving from what we called a demographic dividend toward demographic drag.

We need to think about how to respond. Perhaps some countries with extremely low fertility could encourage higher birth rates. At the same time, advances in healthcare, medicine, and working practices can help people remain productive for longer if they choose.

Thinking about how to adapt the machine of the past is one of the key challenges for the future.

Sven Smit: Let me close with one final part of the machine that Chris already mentioned: energy.

If we showed the chart comparing countries’ energy consumption with GDP, you’d see something remarkable. It’s incredibly difficult to get data from every country in the world to line up so neatly, but this relationship is almost a straight line. There is no modern life without energy.

I like the second law of thermodynamics, which says that order cannot exist without energy. In a sense, our economy is a form of order. Good food is organized matter. Good cars are organized molecules assembled into something useful. All of this progress came from having more energy while also becoming much more energy efficient.

Think about the very first Daimler automobile. It was a wooden machine with huge wheels that consumed enormous amounts of fuel while moving slowly and carrying very little weight. Compare that with a modern car. The productivity of energy has increased by well over 1,000-fold. Progress required both more energy—to support larger homes and faster transportation—and better efficiency so that we didn’t waste it. Energy makes the world go round.

Can growth be good for the climate?

Nick Leung: So then, is growth a good thing overall? What should it look like in the future?

Chris Bradley: One of the first questions in the debate over whether growth has been good is climate change. We had to grapple with the fact that China has produced a large share of recent emissions while also lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. How do we reconcile those facts? The energy system that supports our well-being and safety also creates significant externalities.

Marc Canal: Sometimes we frame the issue as an either-or choice: Either we grow and produce emissions, or we stop growing to reduce emissions. But one encouraging development is that a number of countries have managed to grow while reducing emissions. We are seeing some decoupling. We may eventually see the same in China, although it’s still too early to say. The important point is that it’s possible to improve living standards while reducing emissions.

Sven Smit: One report we produced at MGI found that although emissions generally rise with economic growth—particularly when poorer countries are catching up—the real bottleneck in reducing emissions is money. The alternatives require large capital investments.

Interestingly, the additional carbon emissions generated by growth are smaller than the additional financial resources that growth provides to solve the problem. Take the Rhine River in my home country, the Netherlands. In the 1970s, you couldn’t swim in it because of pollution—cadmium, salts, and all sorts of contaminants flowing down from upstream.

Today you can swim in the Rhine again. Some people say the currents are still dangerous, and it’s certainly cold, but the river is clean. The same thing happened in China. Rivers became polluted during industrialization, and then, once the country became wealthier, it invested in cleaning them up. Money is often the bottleneck for environmental improvement.

Chris Bradley: It’s similar to plastic pollution. Studies show that much of the plastic entering the oceans comes from places like the Ganges and Indonesia, where waste collection systems are still underdeveloped. Many environmental problems—litter, deforestation, pollution—actually improve with development rather than worsen. In that sense, more growth, not less, can help solve those problems.

On inequality

Sven Smit: Of course, there are other problems.

Marc Canal: Exactly. Whenever we talk about growth, people rightly ask how it’s distributed. Who benefits? Who doesn’t? What about inequality? Have we simply created more wealth while allowing inequality to increase so dramatically that only a small number of people benefit?

And so this debate is actually very nuanced because inequality has indeed gone up in some places and not in others.

If we look at the world in aggregate as though it were a single country, what’s interesting is that inequality has declined since the 1980s. We first had the Great Divergence, when some countries pulled ahead while others lagged. But over the past 50 to 60 years, inequality has generally been falling. If you treat every human being equally, regardless of national borders, global inequality has been decreasing, and I think that’s good news to begin with.

Now, as I said, inequality has increased in some countries. But even in places like the United States, which is the best-known example, and even in China, we’ve seen it plateau or even decline slightly over the last ten to 15 years.

The most important question, though, is whether growth is good or bad for inequality. That’s really the crux of the issue because that’s what matters for the future. I like to think about it this way: if you care about inequality—and we do—what’s the best way to reduce it, with or without growth?

There’s a simple piece of arithmetic here. If inequality is to decrease in a stagnant or shrinking economy, someone has to get less for someone else to get more. That’s a much more conflict-ridden world. If you try to reduce inequality without growth, it’s really hard. But when the economy is growing and the pie is getting bigger, it’s possible to reduce inequality while everyone becomes better off. I think that’s simply a much better world to live in.

Affordability and economic empowerment

Sven Smit: When we did our work on people being poorer than their parents, the biggest factor wasn’t income. It was affordability, which everyone is talking about now. That was already true when we did that work eight, ten, and even 15 years ago.

The reality is that while incomes at the bottom have generally been rising reasonably well—sometimes even faster than middle incomes—the affordability of essentials such as energy, education, and housing has become a major challenge. As economists, we all know what solves that: productivity. Greater productivity makes things cheaper.

But the system also must be designed to provide those essentials at reasonable cost. There are some market failures that we simply have to acknowledge. I think they’re solvable, but they haven’t been solved yet. So there is real complexity in the discussion about equality.

Nick Leung: If you compare purchasing power parity—which is based on a basket of goods—with our empowerment calculation, you find that essentials have a disproportionate impact on people at the lower end of the income scale. I think we calculated that the empowerment line in Indonesia was about [US] $14 per day, whereas in the United States it was around $35 per day, even on a PPP-adjusted basis. That gives you a sense of how much the cost of life’s essentials differs from place to place.

Sven Smit: I think that also reinforces our thesis about a world of plenty leading toward Switzerland. Let’s take the big headline from that empowerment work: 4.8 billion people are living below what we call the empowerment line. We’re all familiar with the poverty line. The World Bank’s figure is around $2.15. That essentially means you have enough food most of the time and don’t die of famine, but you lack basic education, healthcare, and the ability to invest.

Our definition of empowerment is different. It means having basic food, shelter, education, healthcare, and a small amount of discretionary income. For example, a farmer in Kenya can buy a water pump, move from failed harvests to two or three successful harvests a year, earn more money, and send their children to school. Today, 4.8 billion people live below that line.

Our vision of plenty only works if those 4.8 billion people can catch up to something approaching the middle of where Switzerland is today. A large part of what we’re discussing is catch-up growth, and we need to demonstrate that when we talk about the possibility of a world of plenty. And within those 4.8 billion people are individuals living in Switzerland and the United States who are still not fully empowered.

Chris Bradley: The key issue is affordability. That’s why having a single global poverty number—whether it’s $3 or $4 a day—doesn’t really make sense. The real question is what it takes to live an empowered life. In many places, including the United States, Australia, and Europe, inflation in essential services like healthcare, childcare, and housing has far outpaced inflation elsewhere. Phones and consumer electronics have become cheaper, but the services people rely on have become much more expensive. That’s one of the major challenges we’ll have to solve if we want a world of plenty: making life affordable.

When we stepped back and looked at the whole inequality debate, we found it was much more complicated than the popular narrative suggests. Overall, the global story is actually quite positive. If you account for government transfers and social spending—which have expanded dramatically as countries became richer—inequality is lower than many people assume. I’m reading a history of Australia at the moment. During the Second World War, government spending was around 11 percent of the economy. Today it’s closer to 40 percent. Once you account for those changes, the picture of inequality looks quite different. It’s certainly not enough to justify abandoning the growth project. Instead, it’s a call to action to continue pursuing growth because that’s how we bring everyone up to the empowerment line.

Trade in a multipolar world

Nick Leung: One of the great tailwinds over the last century, especially during what Sven called the era of markets over roughly the last 25 years, has been the enormous expansion of global trade. At MGI, we analyzed not just the physical distance of trade but what we called the geopolitical distance of trade. We created an index based on how similarly countries vote at the United Nations.

As you’d expect, one end of the spectrum includes the United States, the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States], and much of Europe. At the other end are countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, which vote very differently. What we’ve observed over the last several years is that countries are increasingly trading with partners that are geopolitically closer to them. That’s a proxy for what people describe as the fragmentation of the world. There’s been a lot of discussion, particularly in the United States, about decoupling. Our view is that throughout the last century, new forms of collaboration have continually emerged, especially after the Second World War. We haven’t yet figured out the right model of collaboration for today’s geopolitical environment, but we’re confident it can be done. Even if you look at the sheer scale of trade today, intra-Asia trade alone is worth more than total global trade was 25 years ago. The opportunities for productive collaboration remain enormous.

Chris Bradley: The real question is whether a world that’s no longer unipolar can still be pragmatic about trade. I don’t see any reason why a multipolar world can’t continue trading.

Countries may not trade every strategic technology. There will be competition in areas like AI and semiconductors. But things like soybeans can still move around the world. Australia, for example, has enormous trade with China.

What’s possible for the 2100 economy

Sven Smit: Let’s do the numbers. Suppose everyone reaches at least today’s Swiss standard of living. Switzerland and the United States could continue advancing, but the global gap narrows substantially. How large an economy are we actually talking about?

Nick pointed out earlier that GDP per capita increased sixfold over the last century. Looking ahead to 2100, we don’t take a position on population. Under a low-fertility scenario, the population could fall to around eight billion. Under a higher-fertility scenario, it could reach 12 billion. The challenge is greater with 12 billion people, so we deliberately chose the harder case—not because we think it’s the most likely outcome, but because we wanted to know whether it could still work.

If the global population reached 12 billion and everyone achieved at least Switzerland’s current GDP per capita, average global GDP per capita would rise about sixfold, just as it did over the last century. Because of the larger population, however, the total global economy would be about 8.5 times larger.

That number is important.

Most baseline scenarios from organizations like the [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] assume the global economy will be roughly three times larger by 2100. An 8.5-fold increase creates a fundamentally different world. With slow growth, societies are more likely to end up in a zero-sum environment. With rapid growth, there’s much more available for everyone.

Take energy as an example. In a threefold economy, you’re essentially replacing fossil fuels one-for-one with renewables. In an 8.5-fold economy, total energy demand rises by perhaps two to three times. You need much more electricity and much more low-carbon energy. But you still need oil and gas for petrochemicals, fertilizers, paints, and many other products. The discussion isn’t simply renewables replacing fossil fuels. It’s about expanding total energy availability.

So imagine an economy that’s 8.5 times larger by 2100, with GDP per capita six times higher and everyone enjoying at least the living standards of today’s Switzerland.

Chris Bradley: To get there, we created a kind of bill of materials for that world. We asked whether there would be enough resources. Would we have enough materials? Enough energy? Enough food, while using less land so biodiversity could recover? Enough clean air to stay within an acceptable carbon budget? Enough innovation?

We wanted to know not whether it would definitely happen, but whether it was possible.

When I first presented this idea, an eminent biologist said, “Chris, you don’t understand. A culture growing in a petri dish eventually reaches the edge, runs out of room, and growth stops.” We discovered something interesting. First, the world’s petri dish is enormous. Second, unlike a real petri dish, it keeps expanding because we continually become better at doing things. It’s a giant, growing petri dish.

Eventually humanity will reach some limit to growth. My view is simply that we should aim to reach that limit only after everyone enjoys a Swiss standard of living and has the opportunity to live a fully empowered life.

Nick Leung: Overall, primary energy production would probably need to increase by about two to three times. The really striking figure is electricity. Electrified energy would need to increase by roughly seven to 12 times because so much more of the economy would become electrified. That means enormous investments in electricity grids and related infrastructure over the next century. Low-carbon energy—especially renewables—would need to increase by roughly 20 to 30 times.

Our conclusion is that this is achievable. The technologies exist, and in some places the required rates of expansion have already been demonstrated. China, for example, has already built electrification and renewable capacity at extraordinary speed.

Chris Bradley: In fact, China’s current pace is roughly two and a half times faster than what we’d need globally. It’s already demonstrating that this scale of build-out is possible.

Nick Leung: Nuclear will also be an important part of the solution. The scale required globally is similar to what France accomplished during its major nuclear expansion in the 1970s.

Marc Canal: To put it in context, the scenario we developed assumes that roughly 40 percent of global energy comes from solar and wind, another 40 percent from nuclear, and the remainder from other sources combined with technologies like carbon capture. That scenario certainly won’t be exactly right, but we wanted concrete numbers so we could estimate the required build-out. For solar and wind, we already have examples showing it’s possible. China is already building at roughly the pace we’d need globally. What we need, especially in many Western countries, is to rediscover the willingness to build.

For nuclear, however, we’d need a very large acceleration. If you scaled France’s nuclear expansion from the 1970s and 1980s up to the entire world, you’d be building around 200 reactors per year. Our estimate suggests the world would actually need around 300 per year. That’s a dramatic increase, but it demonstrates that large-scale deployment has historical precedents.

Sven Smit: Some people argue that the answer will instead be solar combined with batteries. In many ways, it’s a competition between battery storage and firm baseload generation from nuclear or gas with carbon capture. What we do know is that we’ll need reliable backup or baseload power. Our argument isn’t that nuclear is the only solution. If batteries become cheap and effective enough, they could play that role instead. What matters is that we build. If we build enough, we’ll discover which technologies are best. If we don’t build, we’ll never find out.

One question I hear all the time is whether there’s actually enough material. It’s great to talk about building all these nuclear plants and giving everyone nice houses, offices, air conditioning, and everything else. But can we actually do it, or are we going to consume the Earth’s entire crust in the process?

Chris Bradley: Let’s take copper as an example. Imagine all the copper currently in use around the world. Put it all into one giant warehouse and call that 100. In our 2100 scenario, we’d need another 500. In other words, we’d need about five times as much copper as we’ve already produced.

At first glance that sounds ridiculous, but it really isn’t. Current proven reserves alone would provide roughly one and a half times today’s total stock. Remember, reserves are deposits we know exist and can mine economically with today’s technology. Resources are much larger than reserves. Over recent decades, global copper reserves have roughly doubled every 16 to 20 years.

When we examined every major commodity, we didn’t find a single one where projected demand by 2100 came anywhere close to exhausting available resources, even if future reserve growth were only a fraction of what we’ve seen historically. Take Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine. It contains more reserves today than when mining first began because technology has improved. The mine is deeper, the ore grade is lower, but we’ve developed better ways of extracting copper.

Compounding really matters. When we looked across all the materials, we found that available resources, combined with continued improvements in reserves, comfortably supported the levels of growth we’re discussing.

The robots are coming—along with AI

Marc Canal: The other issue everyone is thinking about is AI. When people talk about progress today, they think about AI, productivity, and robots. So, what do we think about robots?

Sven Smit: I sometimes joke that “the Romans are coming”—except I misspell it because it’s really the robots that are coming. In fact, they’re already here.

Many logistics centers are now installing more robots than they’re hiring workers. Factories have been full of robots for years. We’ve done several analyses suggesting that a large share of today’s tasks can be automated using existing or emerging AI and robotics technologies. This is where the 8.5-times-larger economy becomes important. Imagine we automate 80 percent of today’s work while the economy only triples. The remaining 20 percent of work becomes 60 percent of today’s total, leaving perhaps 40 percent of people without enough work—or everyone working substantially fewer hours.

Now imagine an economy that’s 8.5 times larger. Instead of having too many workers, we might actually need more people, or more robots, to keep up. That’s a very different world.

The key point is that automation doesn’t follow growth. Automation makes things cheaper, and that affordability creates growth. People are beginning to talk about abundance—not universal basic income, but universal abundance. That may sound overly optimistic. But if there’s ever been a time when an 8.5-times-larger economy seems plausible, it’s during the emergence of advanced AI.

Progress won’t happen in a straight line. It will accelerate, slow down, and accelerate again. But does AI have the potential to support the additional productivity growth we need?

The answer is yes.

The productivity improvements required aren’t dramatically different from what we’ve already achieved during the strongest periods of the last century. Ultimately, that’s the journey. But if your mindset begins with the belief that it can’t happen, then you won’t build it.

Chris Bradley: I completely agree. We’ve deliberately taken a balanced view of AI.

If AI turns out to be overhyped, then it won’t dramatically affect the labor market. But if AI really is as transformative as people claim, then it will generate such an enormous economic boom that we won’t have enough people to do everything that needs doing. It’s logically inconsistent to argue that AI will become incredibly powerful while simultaneously leaving everyone permanently unemployed. Super-powerful AI would create enormous wealth, especially given the demographic challenges we’re already facing.

So yes, I’m optimistic. That doesn’t mean the path will be smooth or predictable. Expecting a perfectly straight line would be just as unrealistic.

Nick Leung: If Switzerland is our benchmark, how much additional productivity does the world actually need? Looking back over the last century, if we focus on the era of markets beginning around 1997, per capita growth was about 2.3 times. We need roughly 2.6 times. So what productivity growth do we actually require?

Marc Canal: It depends on demographics. Overall growth is a combination of productivity growth and employment growth. If employment stays roughly flat instead of benefiting from the demographic tailwinds we enjoyed in the past, we’d need productivity growth to accelerate by perhaps another 0.6 or 0.7 percentage points.

But there are many ways employment can improve. As we’ve discussed, people can remain productive for longer, among other things. So the required acceleration in productivity really isn’t extraordinary.

Chris Bradley: We need to speed up a little and keep going. Much of that acceleration will happen in places like Africa, where productivity has already been improving.

Five shifts to get to plenty

Sven Smit: Let me summarize what we’ve discussed about plenty. We’ve explored many different aspects of what’s possible, and we’ll go into much greater detail later.

But to get there, several things have to happen.

First, people have to believe that this future is possible—not guaranteed, but possible. Instead of focusing only on limits, we need to recognize the possibility of abundance.

Second, we need to believe that growth is fundamentally a good thing, that it helps create prosperity while also giving us the resources to solve the problems we care about.

Third, we have to believe there’s enough. Enough food. Enough materials. Enough resources for 12 billion people to enjoy at least the living standards of Switzerland today.

We also need to change our mindset from “it’s complicated to build” to “it’s great to build.” That includes permitting systems and everything else that currently slows progress. The future only arrives if we build it.

Finally, we need a new narrative. We call it the “narrative of progress.” It’s built around the possibility of a century of plenty—a story worth telling to future generations.

If all we’ve achieved is encouraging people to raise their ambitions a little and imagine a future of plenty, then I think we’ve done something worthwhile.

All: Hear, hear.