Is progress behind us, or is ‘plenty’ still possible?

Over the past 100 years, humanity has made stunning advances: longer lives, higher incomes, and billions of people lifted out of poverty. Much of that progress remains uneven and incomplete, however. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, we share an adapted conversation from the McKinsey Global Institute’s (MGI) podcast A Century of Plenty, which draws on insights from the institute’s recent book of the same name. The book’s coauthors, McKinsey’s Chris Bradley, Marc Canal, Nick Leung, and Sven Smit, explore whether a new era of broad-based prosperity will extend into the next century.

After, McKinsey Editorial Director Roberta Fusaro is joined by coauthor Sven Smit, senior partner emeritus, to discuss where the next big ideas will come from and how leaders should think about knowledge and judgment in an AI-driven world.

For more insights from the book and to hear more from its authors, tune into MGI’s new podcast series A Century of Plenty on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

What comes after a century of gains?

Roberta Fusaro: The world has advanced so much in the past 100 years, from electrification to global trade to unprecedented scientific breakthroughs. Can it achieve another century of progress? That’s the focus of a new book and podcast series from the McKinsey Global Institute [MGI].

Chris Bradley: When you look back, what you see is this stunning century of progress, but totally unfinished business. In fact, MGI research says we’re almost exactly halfway toward empowering the world.

Roberta Fusaro: That’s Chris Bradley, a McKinsey senior partner and coauthor of the book, A Century of Plenty. So what exactly remains unfinished, and what does it mean to have plenty? That’s what we’ll hear about on today’s episode.

Sven Smit: We got a question from a former managing partner of McKinsey, Ian Davis, who asked us, “What have you learned about the past 100 years in the McKinsey Global Institute?” We responded, “We learned a lot.”

Roberta Fusaro: That’s the genesis of the new MGI book, according to Sven Smit, a senior partner emeritus at McKinsey and one of the coauthors. He and Nick Leung, another coauthor and a senior partner at McKinsey, say it’s important to look back in order to help define the future. Among the lessons are …

Nick Leung: There’s the global balance sheet, there’s the empowerment work, there’s all these different things that have been researched now over the past few years.

Roberta Fusaro: Chris agrees.

Chris Bradley: We’re in this time—everyone feels it—of epic change; geopolitical change. We’ve got AI, we’ve got demographics, we’ve got all these things coming at us. It’s a confusing kind of change without a narrative.

Abundance is not assumed, but built

Roberta Fusaro: And how this transformation can result in “plenty” is what the book and related podcast explore. What will it mean for people to acquire enough energy, food, metals, innovation, and environmental protection to make prosperity physically possible? Here’s Marc Canal, McKinsey senior partner and coauthor.

Marc Canal: Plenty means more. It means abundance. So it’s not just that we describe “plenty” using the results—the outcomes like living better lives—but also the way to get there: an abundance of building housing, building energy, building more stuff.

At the end of the day, it’s about more, and this concept can sometimes be tricky for people. Getting affordable housing, getting affordable energy—it actually means building more of it.

Roberta Fusaro: Sven agrees and says that while more building is the goal, we have to acknowledge that large swaths of our world population live in poverty.

Sven Smit: The majority of the world is far away from plenty, which we—jokingly—define in the book using Switzerland. It’s a wealth perspective about where everybody should go.

I always have this image of a farmer in Kenya who just needs a $50 water pump to go from a missed harvest to a fertile harvest. It’s a catch-up to the life that we know. We know it’s technically possible. We just need to get it done.

Roberta Fusaro: It won’t be easy. But Marc says it’s possible and that our best days are not behind us.

Marc Canal: Looking at history, if they had said the same thing at any point in the past 100 years, they would have been so incredibly wrong—on empirical grounds. If you look at what we have—the amount of technology, more educated people than ever before, more brains than ever before—it’s also hard to believe. I would never bet against human ingenuity. I think that’s the worst bet.

Roberta Fusaro: Nick also points to civilization’s history of continuous improvement.

Nick Leung: When you step back 100 years, you see the pattern of overcoming those challenges through ingenuity and engineering. Again and again, in each of the past three centuries, we accelerated human progress.

Roberta Fusaro: The authors feel hopeful about the future and say …

Chris Bradley: Growth is good.

Marc Canal: It starts with a new narrative.

Nick Leung: We always think about “it” as something that is done to us, whereas I think what the book proves is that it’s up to us and the next generations to make it happen.

AI as copilot

Roberta Fusaro: On that positive note, AI might be just the tool that next generations need to launch new ideas and another century of progress. I spoke with Sven about AI’s role in research and why it pays to be optimistic about AI.

Sven, AI is changing the speed and scale at which we create content. What are the pros and cons of that?

Sven Smit: In general, AI is for the good. However, we need to pay attention to some of the risks that might occur. Is the quality sufficient? Are there strange things happening on platforms that may not be truthful and, as a result, create disorganization?

When it comes to technological change, there is always fear. That degree of fear really depends on what you think the world will do in 100 years—whether you believe AI is a real threat or a tool for creating more free time and more good things for people.

Roberta Fusaro: McKinsey, and MGI in particular, have always been associated with big ideas. Do big ideas still matter in this era of large language models [LLMs]?

Sven Smit: I think there is a significant difference between big ideas and good big ideas. Large language models are very good at cataloging what is already out there. But if we look at the structure of human discovery, most of the biggest ideas were not mainstream, which poses an interesting question: How do you get LLMs to be contrarian? That is what I do when I play with them. I always ask for an alternative. Then I explore the proof of the opposite, which is a helpful tool for arriving at better ideas.

LLMs will not come up with the answer to our current world order. That will be an interaction between LLMs and humans. I have never liked the term “artificial intelligence.” I like “intelligence assistance.”

Leadership and judgment in a high‑stakes era

Roberta Fusaro: There’s a lot of AI noise out there, what’s being called “AI slop.” How can researchers and executives ensure they are getting the right data?

Sven Smit: In 80 percent of the major research pieces we have done so far, I would say the data we use is not available to AI. It either sits in proprietary databases or is a newly created set of data. Or it embeds a lot of knowledge from the human brain.

For the Century of Plenty book, I asked, “What sources of energy will we have in 2100?” The answer was 100 percent solar. Then I asked, “Did you get that answer based on a scope-levelized cost equivalency? Or did you get it based on levelized system cost, including the grid, no subsidies, and so forth?” And the answers I got back were completely different.

One of the most important things in strategy is to ask the right question to get to the right answer. I can basically, on the same topic, get two completely different answers with a very small modification of the question.

Roberta Fusaro: Fear and pessimism naturally arise with change. How do you think about that when it comes to AI?

Sven Smit: We live in a society where we have somehow told the world that things are going to be worse, or at least not much better, despite the enormous amount of catch-up growth happening in Africa, India, Indonesia, and so on. The poorest in our countries are getting better. Yes, the inequality gap and other issues exist, but the sum total of the issues cannot be larger than the progress. For some reason, we have talked ourselves into a ditch, which is totally unnecessary in my view.

Roberta Fusaro: How do you combat that pessimistic narrative?

Sven Smit: I understand being pessimistic. If you fundamentally believe things cannot get better, you are going to batten down the hatches and try to divide and conquer. What I am doing is having lunches with young people, as well as older people, and just expressing my optimism about AI. Increasingly, it is being received as a positive counterpoint in complex times. When that happens, I am very happy because then we are at least debating the possibility of progress. Which progress we want—blue, orange, purple—we will see. How we do it exactly and who participates in what way, we will see. But if we stop discussing the possibility of progress, we are in a really odd place.