Marc Canal | How the whole world can exceed Swiss living standards by 2100 (backed by data)

[00:00:50] Beatrice: Today I am joined by Marc Canal, whom I'm very excited to have here. Thank you so much for coming. We met at the Progress Conference, which was actually last year now—it doesn't feel that long ago, but yeah. Your stats have been referenced here a lot already; stats that we discussed when we met at the conference, mainly numbers about how much people believe the future is going to be better or worse, basically.

We'll talk about this during this conversation, but you're here because you just wrote this book, along with some co-authors, called A Century of Plenty. It is about what has happened for the last hundred years and, projecting forward, what could the next hundred years look like if we're ambitious about trying to make them really good. It's a book with a lot of data and a lot of numbers, which I'm very excited to dig into with you, because I know you enjoy that as well.

[00:01:51] Marc: I love data. Yeah.

[00:01:53] Beatrice: So thank you so much for writing it.

[00:01:55] Marc: No, thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here and to continue our discussion that we started at the Progress Conference with the book now.

[00:02:02] Beatrice: Amazing. Exactly. Tell us, what made you want to write this book?

[00:02:08] Marc: I think there were two things, actually. The immediate thing that made us write it was that, in one of our meetings at the McKinsey Global Institute, a former senior managing partner of McKinsey said, "Hey, McKinsey's starting its hundredth anniversary. The McKinsey Global Institute should write a book about the last 100 years—what have we learned?" And so we said, let's write about the last hundred years, but why not also about the next hundred years?

That's a bit how it was born. But the ultimate reason that made us actually write it is that we felt that there's a bit of a crisis of hope these days. We felt that we needed a narrative that was fact-based but optimistic about the future. Hopefully, we can change this narrative a little bit. We don't think we can change the world with one book, but at least we can make a dent.

[00:03:08] Beatrice: Yeah, and helping provide the data. I think that's a really hard part of projecting forward. So thank you so much for that. You mentioned McKinsey; you work at the McKinsey Global Institute. I think many people are familiar with McKinsey, but could you explain what the Institute is and what you do?

[00:03:29] Marc: So basically, the McKinsey Global Institute is the think tank—it's McKinsey's think tank. We basically put data and facts to the most important economic and business issues of the world to help make better decisions. We do research on AI, on demographics, on geopolitics and global flows, et cetera. In this case, we've written this book, which touches upon all of those.

[00:03:54] Beatrice: Yeah. It makes me want to—for the institute where I work, we are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. I'm thinking now we should do some sort of projection of like, what are the breakthrough technologies that we're going to have in 40 years?

[00:04:10] Marc: That'd be very interesting. I would certainly read that.

[00:04:12] Beatrice: Yeah. Well, let's start with the book. The way you do it in the book is you look backward, like you say, a hundred years back. You think about what has changed and you note that there has been a lot of progress. But maybe we just start with 1925. What does the world look like? In the book, you look at the authors' families.

[00:04:44] Marc: Yeah. So look, we start in 1925. First of all, because it's a nice round number and it's a hundred years ago, but also because we thought: look, if today you think the world is complicated, put yourself back in 1925 and think about how the world was then. What do you think people thought then? And look at the next hundred years of progress and see how far along we've come despite that very rocky start that you wouldn't probably have predicted.

In 1925, we were in between two world wars. Mussolini had just gotten into power. In 1925, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. So, there were some things that you probably wouldn't have...

[00:05:32] Beatrice: Chaotic.

[00:05:32] Marc: It was quite chaotic, right? Compared to today, now it feels almost easy. And yes, what we did in the book, which is even more interesting, was that the authors thought: why don't we go back to our families and see how life was then for them?

For example, in the book, I tell the story of my grandpa. My grandpa was born in 1922. In the middle of a coup in Spain, when he was nine, he was working at the farm with his dad. His dad died when he was nine of unknown causes. When he was 14, the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. He was like one year short of going to the front. Life was, again, very tough.

What's interesting is that this is a very specific case, and you may say, "Okay, but not everyone had a war exactly at that point." Surely not. But across the authors—and we are aware that we are privileged professionals in very advanced economies—when we look back at our families, their lives were really pretty tough.

And after that—maybe this is even more interesting—my grandpa, after that very rocky start, was quite lucky because he was a good football player. He ended up playing for Barcelona and for Real Madrid professionally. So you may think, "Okay, he had a tough start, but then he was super rich because football players are super rich." Actually, not even that. At that time—I remember now, he died—but I remember that he used to brag about being able to buy a foreign car, a car from France. To me, that is striking in the sense that now we treat it very naturally; we don't even think whether a car is foreign or not unless you think about it hard. He used to brag about that.

Again, I could go much broader. At that point in 1925, infant mortality in Spain was above 20%; one in five children died before the age of five. Life was pretty tough, and I think we've come a long way.

[00:07:52] Beatrice: Yeah, I agree. Just looking two generations back—even in Sweden right now, which is one of the richest countries in the world—if you go two generations back, it's pretty grim. Things that you would say "Oh my gosh, that's a horror story" today were most people's lives back then. A lot of infant mortality, like you said, and so many people grew up without their parents. It was a very different scene. And yeah, that's very cool about your grandfather as well. It can't be that many people that have played for both.

[00:08:39] Marc: Actually, no. There are a few players that have played for both teams. Some of them are somewhat hated because the teams are rivals, of course. There's a rivalry there. But my grandpa was old enough that he was not hated, I guess.

[00:08:54] Beatrice: When you looked back over these hundred years, was there anything that surprised you the most?

[00:09:07] Marc: I think maybe the thing that surprised me most, other than the little anecdotes... we have in the book a list of things that the average person—or no one—in the US had in 1925. When you look at the list, you are like, "Oh wow, I take all that for granted."

But other than that, looking at the big numbers, the scale of the transformation to me was quite surprising when you put numbers to it. In the book, we talk about how we have progressed thanks to what we call a "Machine of Progress" with eight parts: workers and skills, investment, invention, energy, cities, markets, trade, and—am I missing one? Those are the parts.

When you run the numbers, what you see is that the number of people grew four times since 1925 to today—from 2 billion to 8 billion. But the industrial workforce (the workforce that is not working on farms) grew nine times. Each worker today has nine times more capital to work with—tools, machines—than a worker then.

Maybe the most striking one is the energy one. Today we consume 10 times more energy globally than back then. The scale of what we've built is insane. There's one stat that I like in particular: do you remember the length of the global network of pipelines for gas and oil?

[00:11:01] Beatrice: No, I don't remember that.

[00:11:03] Marc: It's like going from the Earth to the moon and back twice.

[00:11:07] Beatrice: Oh, wow.

[00:11:07] Marc: Right. The scale of the system we've built is absolutely insane. You're constantly surprised by how large it is.

[00:11:18] Beatrice: I think actually one of the stats that I remember being more surprised by was the expectancy in life. How long you were expected to live. Do you remember?

[00:11:32] Marc: Yeah. Well, life expectancy globally has grown by about 40 years. On average, we used to live until our thirties. Of course, it's an average because a lot of children died; that doesn't mean everyone died when they were 30. A lot of people died when they were 70, but on average, that's what happened. Today, globally, it's 73. In some places, it's 85 or 86. That's a quite large change as well.

[00:12:00] Beatrice: That was—I mean, this is a more sober note—but I remember being very surprised by the difference between countries today. Like Nigeria versus Japan. I think the example you used in the book was that I would have expected 20 years difference, which is very big, but it was like 30 years.

[00:12:20] Marc: Yes. Even today, I think in Nigeria it's still below 60, while in Japan it's above 85. What's interesting there, and what you see in the most recent past, is that even though the gap is still very large—and that's one of the messages in the book—we aren't saying it's all good and we're done. On the contrary, what we say in the book is that we're sort of halfway there at best. We've made a lot of progress, but in the world, there's a lot to do still.

Regarding life expectancy in particular, the gap has been closing faster than in the past. Life expectancy grows a lot faster in countries that have low life expectancy than in those that have high life expectancy. That's the positive side of it, even though in some countries it's still quite low.

[00:13:19] Beatrice: That's great. Do you know what is the main driving force of that?

[00:13:25] Marc: We did some research on this actually a while back in 2019 called Pixels of Progress. We divided the world into 50,000 regions instead of our typical 200 countries and tried to analyze each of them locally. We looked at GDP per capita, life expectancy, and all this.

Basically, it's "catch-up health," just like "catch-up growth." We also discussed that in the book. When you're at the frontier of economics or health, it's hard to push that frontier because you have to create new things. But if you're below the frontier of knowledge or health, it's easier to catch up if you do the right things and make the right investments. When you've reached 80 or 90, extending life takes a lot of effort, even though we still do it. When you're at 50 or 55, very simple things—just adopting things that have already been created—give you a big boost.

[00:14:41] Beatrice: Like decreasing infant mortality or something like that?

[00:14:43] Marc: Exactly. And even basic health and safety measures, like having clean water and things like that.

[00:14:54] Beatrice: Maybe that's actually a good transition to one concept that I also learned, which was very interesting: the "Empowerment Line." Because maybe people are familiar with the poverty line, but you talk about this concept of the Empowerment Line.

[00:15:14] Marc: Yes. That comes from McKinsey Global Institute's research from two or three years ago. Normally, people hear about the poverty line. What the Empowerment Line does is say: look, there's a poverty line which is very important to cross, but the extreme poverty line is a low threshold. It's very important, but it's low.

We created this line where we say it's not just about not being extremely poor. It's about covering basic needs and even having some agency—having the opportunity to make decisions with your life, even go on holiday from time to time, and all that. It's not being super rich at all, but it is about clearing some important thresholds well above the poverty line.

We did intense work in terms of adjusting for price differences across countries. Again, what you find there is that the percentage of people below the Empowerment Line is much higher in emerging economies. In advanced economies, there are also often between 10% and 20% of people below the Empowerment Line because of a lack of affordability—for example, when housing or energy is very expensive.

Globally, about 60% of the world is below the Empowerment Line. We've made a lot of progress—if you look at the extreme poverty line, it's now below 10%—but in terms of empowerment, 60% of the world is still below that. I think that's one more threshold to think about, and one that we can totally clear in the next hundred years for sure. But there's a lot of work to do there.

[00:17:06] Beatrice: Yeah, let's definitely try to clear that one. We're going to talk about the even higher ambition that you've set, also. It's really interesting because, like you say, it gives a more nuanced vision of what's going on. Do you remember, for example, what it was in the US?

[00:17:30] Marc: I think in the US it's about 20% of people below the Empowerment Line. In the US, it's not an $11 line; it's closer to $50, because you need more to be able to afford a house, et cetera.

[00:18:01] Beatrice: For someone like me or listeners of this podcast, we're probably familiar to some extent with the idea that we've made a lot of progress. There have been some interesting books and data trying to point this out in the last few years. But what you do in this book that's really interesting is the projection forward. Can you describe what it is that you're aiming for? What ambitious goal are you trying to achieve?

[00:18:39] Marc: It's very important to say that we don't "predict" or "project" this. It's more of an ambitious goal and a scenario against which we can test things.

What we do in the book is say: look, we've made a lot of progress. We could do a lot more. Let's set a bar that is numerical so that we can measure against it. Otherwise, it's always just words like, "Oh yeah, there's a lot of technology, we're better educated." Let's aim high.

Specifically, we say let's imagine that by 2100, the poorest country in the world is as rich as Switzerland is today, and everyone else is above that. That's the floor. The first interesting thing you see there is that you may think this would require GDP per capita growth of 15% per year. Actually, no; it's like 2.6% per year, which is pretty close to how much we've been growing in the last 25 years and not too far from the last hundred. So it's not even a massive acceleration; it's fairly similar to what has been happening.

Then we say: how many people is this world going to have? Instead of just taking the medium scenario of the UN—which would be about 10 billion—we say: this isn't a "world of plenty" if some countries basically disappear. With very low fertility rates like you have now in Korea, those places would lose 70% of their population by the end of the century. We just say: if those countries slowly creep back closer to a 2.1 fertility rate, what happens? We get to 12 billion people, which stresses the scenario even more. It's a good thing to test: is that even possible?

Altogether, we get to an economy that is 8.5 times larger than today's economy. And with that, we ask: is that possible? Can we physically do this? That's what we do.

[00:21:06] Beatrice: It's very useful because you're testing the hypothesis of whether it is even materially possible. You outline a few key conditions that we need to achieve in order to get to this future. Do you want to go over what they are?

[00:21:34] Marc: We basically test—and there's all the detail in the book—how much energy that world would need. How many materials and minerals would that world need to build it? Is there enough? Can we produce enough food for those 12 billion people—protein-rich, quality food? Do we have enough innovation to get the productivity growth that we need? And can we do this within planetary boundaries?

We test those five conditions with quite a bit of detail. Energy is very interesting. If the world economy is eight times what it is today, we would need—not eight times the energy, because we get more efficient over time—but two to three times more energy than today.

At the same time, this world will probably be a lot more electrified. We're in a race for electrons these days. Electricity would likely go from 20% of the energy system to about 70% or 80%, and we want that electricity to be clean. We would need two to three times more energy, but about 30 times more clean electricity.

That gives you a shift in mindset. We've been talking about the energy transition for decades. The transition is very important, but we need to transition and expand. We need a lot more energy. That's why we call it the concept of "Plenty."

Is that feasible? We created a detailed scenario: what if we generate it with 40% solar and wind, 40% nuclear, and 20% other things (hydro, gas, geothermal)? Our conclusion is that it's a challenge because building the system is hard work. That's one of the motivations of the book: it's not just "it's possible," but "it's possible, but it's a lot of hard work, so start doing it today."

When you look at what we've done in the past—China has built 10 times the electricity capacity in the last 25 years. In 2022 and 2023, we built more solar capacity globally than in the whole history of humanity cumulatively before that. When France decided to build nuclear in the seventies, it built 50 reactors in 15 years. If you scale that to the world level, that's quite a lot. It's an ambitious thing, but history shows that when we decide to build, we can.

[00:25:06] Beatrice: What was interesting about this section is that you talk about doing this without sacrificing biodiversity. If I think of people's arguments against what you're saying, it would be "Yes, but we would need to sacrifice this or that." For example, mining is something people have a gut reaction against—it's seen as destroying our planet. But we need it for those minerals. You point out that we are getting better at doing that more efficiently.

[00:25:52] Marc: Exactly. Over time we're getting better at all those things. Generally, what you see—and this is why we advocate for economic growth and prosperity—is that the places where those things are problematic tend to be the places that are poorer, because they don't have the resources to do it cleanly.

Take plastics, for example. We talk about it in the West all the time, and we should care about throwing plastic in the ocean. But most plastic in the ocean comes from countries that do not have the wealth to have good waste management systems. To get good waste management systems, you need to be richer. Most plastic does not come from us, even though it's good that we feel a bit guilty about it. The main reason there's plastic in the ocean is because some countries cannot afford good waste management.

Sometimes economic growth seems like a problem for the environment, but we see that it's often more the solution than the problem. Another one is climate change, which we can discuss.

[00:27:22] Beatrice: Do you want to expand on that? That is probably the most common argument against growth. What would you say about that?

[00:27:36] Marc: For climate change, let's look at the data first. We have been able to grow the economy and reduce emissions for quite some time now. That's not just a theory; growth and emissions have been decoupled for a while. If you look from 2015 to today, Europe has grown its GDP by 15% and has reduced its emissions by 10%—and that is adjusted for trade.

[00:28:14] Beatrice: Maybe a quick side note for listeners who aren't super familiar: why is it so important to have economic growth?

[00:28:23] Marc: We can go back to basics. It's in large part because of what I was saying. Let's take this one first and then go back to climate.

First of all, GDP per capita growth is what drives living standards. We want to have a better life. We've made progress, but there's a lot more to make. But even if you don't think about GDP—which people think of as an esoteric metric—what do you care about? Do you care about affordability? You care about people being able to afford a house or energy. What do you need for that? You need more of it. You need to build more housing, more transport, and more cleaner energy systems. All that is growth at the end of the day.

If we care about inequality, how do you reduce inequality in a world that is not growing? The only way is to take from someone to give to someone else, and that's a very problematic world with really tough trade-offs. Having economic growth makes those trade-offs much easier.

[00:29:54] Beatrice: Yeah. I think you mentioned it in the book because it moves away from zero-sum thinking—like your point that you would then have to take it from someone else—into positive-sum thinking: that the pie can actually grow and everyone can get more, basically.

[00:30:07] Marc: Exactly. It’s basically that, but again, that’s not my opinion; that’s mathematics. The only way in which you can reduce inequality and at the same time make everyone better off is by growing. And then there is climate, which normally tends to be the most contentious one—and I understand why, for good reasons. So again, first of all, I already said that there’s this decoupling going on in which you have economic growth but we also have falling emissions. Even, by the way, in places like China where you still don't have falling emissions, the economy has grown a lot faster than emissions.

The jury is still out, but it seems that in 2024–25, emissions seem to be plateauing in China overall, which is quite interesting. Again, I don't want to make big claims here because it's still very early, but even then, that’s the case. But why is growth, we think, important for climate change? I would say for two reasons. The first one is for mitigation. Mitigation means fewer emissions. Why? Because to emit less, you need better technologies, more technologies, and all those need funding. To fund those, you need growth.

Take Europe, for example. Europe right now has a challenge of funding healthcare for an aging society, pensions, defense, and energy. If you don't grow in that world, it's actually pretty hard to do this. We are facing these trade-offs. With more economic growth from productivity growth, we can fund those mitigation measures and energy. And the other one that I think is very important and sometimes overlooked is adaptation.

[00:31:54] Marc: Because climate change matters given the climate hazards that it produces, but also how it impacts us. What you see is that countries that are richer—that have grown more in the past—are better at adapting to climate. The climate hazards are still going to be here, and maybe more of them—we don't know that. But basically, if we go back a hundred years, about half a million people per year died because of natural catastrophes and natural disasters. Today it’s below 40,000 people, and we have four times more people in the world.

Thanks to getting richer, we are able to combat the effects of climate. That has to do with air conditioning, irrigation systems, and coastal defenses. Again, all of those require wealth. So I would say, from the standpoint of mitigation and from the standpoint of adaptation, without economic growth, it's actually quite hard.

[00:33:00] Beatrice: If you think of the projection forward, what do you see as the biggest challenges to this "progress machine" or to meeting these conditions?

[00:33:13] Marc: Well, first of all, in the book, we do talk about the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." In one part of the book, we just say: look, there's a precondition to all this, which is that we should still be around. There are some things that could just completely kill us off. We don’t go into those because we are not experts at all on them, but we do mention them because we think it's important. So, things like AI going rogue, a massive pandemic, or nuclear war. We mention those and say: if you want to know about those, read Toby Ord or other people who really know about this and have done their research.

Assuming that we are around, what we're saying involves two things. One is that the limits aren't physical. In a bit of a cheesy way, we say they are in our hearts and our minds. It's about putting the systems in place and really acting toward it more than the physical limits. The other thing is that we’ve had this machine, but as with any machine, this "Machine of Progress" needs upgrading over time. The same machine that you used 50 years ago doesn't work today anymore; you have to keep upgrading it.

We are at an inflection point. The fact that people feel a bit confused and uncertain is not a fluke; it's true. Things are changing. So we need to upgrade this machine, and we point to some things that are important—like demographics, which are shifting quite a bit, and investment. To me, those are the main ones. If I had to point at three, I would say demographics is one, investment is another—this point I was making around building and ensuring we build what we need for this future—and geopolitics is probably the other one.

[00:35:24] Beatrice: Maybe we can dive into all three of them. The demographics one is very interesting, and I feel the attention it’s getting has risen. You talk about demographics falling, and for the updates we need to the progress machine, people would be curious to hear how you think about AI automating things in your projection of how the future could go, and also just what can be done about the demographics challenge.

[00:36:04] Marc: Totally. By the way, on the AI front, I don't just see it as a challenge; I was thinking about the real challenges of the machine. In the book, we talk about whether there is an innovation challenge, but right now it’s hard to say that there is—with AI, there may be other things to talk about.

With demographics in particular, I don't know how much context people have about the situation more generally, but basically, we find today that we've had a "demographic dividend" in the past, which means demographics helped the economy grow. Now, more and more countries are going to be facing a "demographic drag" that comes from low fertility rates. We’re having fewer babies. That is not a problem up to a point—and this has nothing to do with my opinion on how many babies people should have; people should have as many as they want.

But it is true that when fertility rates drop very fast and very far—for example, South Korea is at 0.7, and even Spain, my own country, is around 1.0 now—then some problems arise. You get lower economic growth and problems with public finances. It’s harder to fund pensions and healthcare. Even more importantly, you have basic population volume declines. At a 0.7 fertility rate, today’s grandparents—which means you and I—100 of them are only going to have 13 grandchildren. That’s a massive change. It basically means this society almost disappears, and the social changes it brings are quite important regarding infrastructure and schools.

[00:38:26] Beatrice: People build a lot of meaning around children as well, and...

[00:38:30] Marc: That’s probably also the case. Again, if they don't have children, it's their decision. Who am I to say? But more broadly, the demographic challenge is hard to fix. It has one advantage: it is very predictable. But since it happens very slowly, we also ignore it sometimes, which makes it dangerous.

When we say "upgrade the machine," there are basically two main fronts. One is trying to raise fertility rates in countries where they’re very low—but that’s complicated and we could have a whole podcast about that. The other two are opportunities for "more work" in the sense of healthy longevity. People can work for more years. We don’t mean they should work until they’re 80, but when you look at the stats, the decline in workforce participation between 50 and 65 is massive. And many people want to work more. When someone leaves a job or gets fired when they’re 50-something, it’s not that easy to get back into the labor market.

In some emerging economies, there is also still a lot of margin for women’s labor force participation rates, which are still very low in some places. The other big one is what you were alluding to with AI, which you could call more broadly "productivity." If you cannot have more hours, you need to make every hour more productive. That has to do with AI and any technology or changes in general skills that make us more productive. That’s how we have to retune the machine on the demographics front.

[00:40:48] Beatrice: I think there is a specific number you use... how far forward do you expect AI to automate tasks? Is it 30% or something?

[00:41:00] Marc: We actually have a new report out from the McKinsey Global Institute called Agents, Robots, and Us. It’s a beautiful title. That paper says that 57% of hours are theoretically automatable by AI. That doesn't mean those are jobs lost; it means some hours are automated, while others get created or the AI complements other tasks.

It also doesn't mean it happens tomorrow. Implementation and adoption can take between 20 and 80 years. But the theoretical potential is 57% of hours. Even more interestingly, we analyzed 6,800 skills. We find that most skills—above 70%—are a combination of humans, robots, and agents. There is a small percentage that is only human, like conflict resolution. You don't imagine a robot or an agent doing that, though maybe they can help even there. Then others, like invoicing, are very "agent." But most, like writing, are a combination. It’s really about mastering this combination that matters.

[00:43:07] Beatrice: Last point on the demography thing: it’s fun to think about potential technological solutions, like artificial wombs. I’ve been talking to women lately who say they would be much more inclined to have kids if it wasn’t for the physical challenges, which are very obvious. I saw a stat that in some places like Kenya, you’re more likely to die from a pregnancy diagnosis than you are from a breast cancer diagnosis in Sweden, adjusted for age.

[00:44:06] Marc: I didn't know that.

[00:44:07] Beatrice: Yeah, it's quite crazy. The other thing you mentioned was innovation. Do you want to go into that?

[00:44:20] Marc: To get this growth and progress, you need productivity. Productivity is the driver of long-term living standards; it means being able to produce more goods and services per hour worked. That determines how wages grow. In terms of innovation, I’m not sure there’s much of a debate anymore about whether we have enough. For some time, there was this idea that "ideas are getting harder to find"—it’s a very famous paper. It still stands to an extent, but I feel the debate has moved on because of AI.

The argument that paper makes is that the ultimate resource is people. If you have fewer people and it’s harder to find ideas, it’s harder to get innovation. Now, AI changes that. It automates the innovation process itself. For the first time, it can create ideas of its own or combine ideas. That puts into question the point that having fewer brains thrown at research will slow things down.

And it's not just AI. We have another report called Arenas of Competition that goes through other technologies. There is a lot more innovation—nuclear fusion, modular construction in the space industry. In the book, we use conservative assumptions. We never say something is possible because we’re going to invent a miracle in 20 years; we just do the numbers based on what we have.

[00:47:06] Beatrice: I’d recommend the episode we did with Sam Bowman regarding the blockers of that type of innovation. Do you want to touch on the third point: geopolitics?

[00:47:21] Marc: Geopolitics is the hardest one to talk about because we’re in the middle of it. The world is rearranging. One thing I would say is that there are headlines every day, and it feels like every headline is civilization-ending or civilization-boosting. One advantage of writing about the last hundred years is you learn that every headline is not that extreme. Taking the telescope out from time to time instead of just the microscope really puts things in perspective.

Right now, we are seeing a rearrangement. We don't see the world "deglobalizing"—we trade more every year. What we do see is a reorganization into blocks. Countries are trading more with geopolitically closer countries. If global commerce or the flow of ideas completely broke down, it would be much harder to get a "Century of Plenty." But in a world divided into blocks, we'll see.

I noted a statistic that there were 670 global trade restrictions in 2017 and 3,500 in 2024. We have another quirky metric called "geopolitical distance." We look at how countries vote in the UN. If they always vote together, we give them a 10; if they vote differently, a zero. We find that in the last few years, this score has fallen by about 7%. If you look at foreign direct investment, it's falling twice as fast. That’s a leading indicator that we are moving into blocks.

[00:50:42] Beatrice: It creates this feeling that everything is getting worse, but as you pointed out, a hundred years ago it was also very chaotic. It seems many people today don't feel very hopeful. You dropped some stats that 66% of people in China and India think the next generation will be better off, but in France, that’s only 9%. What explains that gap?

[00:52:18] Marc: I can speculate. It could be that as countries get more prosperous, people raise their expectations, so it’s harder to be happier. But a more convincing reason is that if you have seen less growth during your life, you are more used to a world that looks like a zero-sum game. In China and India, you’ve seen a lot of growth and building, so it’s easier to believe in progress because you’ve seen it with your own eyes. In the US, it’s about 30%. In many parts of Europe, it’s 9% or 14%. If you've seen a world that is largely zero-sum around you, it's normal to believe a different world isn't possible. It’s self-fulfilling. Breaking that circle is what we're trying to do.

[00:53:59] Beatrice: You mentioned that the US is a frontier country, so getting growth there may be more "expensive." Do you want to briefly go into your three frameworks for this?

[00:55:41] Marc: The main takeaway is that 80% of what we're saying is "catch-up growth." Part of the world is at the frontier and has to innovate to push it further. But for 80% of the rest of the world, it's just getting closer to that frontier. For the entire world to reach this goal, the GDP per capita growth rate would need to be 2.6%. If you only take the poorest quartile, they have to grow faster—around 4%. Now, 4% is challenging, but it’s not even what China has done; it's below that. Vietnam is growing at that rate right now. It’s not easy, but there is precedent, and the precedent is actually pretty close to us.

[00:57:43] Beatrice: You mentioned we need a new "Culture of Growth." What does that mean practically?

[00:58:00] Marc: The "Culture of Growth" is a bit of a tribute to one of our heroes, Joel Mokyr, who just got the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2025 and endorsed our book. He has a book called A Culture of Growth which explores why the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe. His conclusion was that the main reason was culture and ideas. Specifically, he says putting science—what he calls "useful knowledge"—toward the betterment of humanity was what changed everything.

Before that, the world didn't think progress was possible or even desirable. They thought the past was better. That mindset shift is what we’re advocating for. The limits aren't physical; you just have to believe in it and go for it.

[00:59:58] Beatrice: If I "strongman" the counter-argument: has progress made us happier?

[01:00:13] Marc: I love that question. When we say progress makes us happier, we aren't saying it’s the only thing that matters. Community, art, beauty, and justice are all very important. But when you look at the data, the correlation between GDP per capita and self-reported life satisfaction is very strong. We also know that being poor makes people unhappy.

Some people mention the Easterlin Paradox, but that has been mostly disproven. More importantly, progress expands your possibilities. It would be paternalistic to say, "I’m going to limit your progress because I know how to make you happy." Progress gives you more opportunity for healthcare, education, housing, or live music. It expands choice, and people can then choose what makes them happier.

One thing we’ve done over the years is work a lot less. Most people worked well above 2,000 hours per year just 70 years ago. Today, it's around 1,400 or 1,500. We work 500 to 1,000 hours less per year. Progress gives you that time to spend with friends and family.

[01:04:31] Beatrice: My last question: you write that a "Century of Plenty" is possible, but we need to make it probable. If someone wants to help make this probable, what are your recommendations?

[01:04:53] Marc: First, talk about it more positively. That may feel frivolous, but always focusing on the negative has consequences. I’m not saying there aren't problems, but when you look at what’s happened in the past, it makes you more positive about today. Talk about possibility.

And since the world is uncertain, I read something recently from Luis Garicano, a Spanish economist, who said: "Take the messy job." I really like that. He’s saying that with AI, humans thrive and add value in the "messy" stuff—the parts that aren't predictable or automatable. So, embrace messiness. Progress is messy, but it’s beautiful.

[01:07:18] Beatrice: Thank you so much, Marc, for writing the book and for joining the podcast.

[01:07:44] Marc: Thank you. It was a pleasure.