Spend some time with senior executives today and you’ll hear both confidence and concern. Most are not acting blindly. They are thinking seriously about capital cycles, technology transitions, resilience and long-term value creation, often under much greater scrutiny than their predecessors faced.
But many admit that the environment seems more difficult to interpret. The long term is changing. Assumptions that remained in the background — about energy, demographics, geopolitics and productivity — are moving at the same time.
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Achieving prosperity in a new era
It feels like we are in uncharted territory: a new era. It is in this context that our new book, “A century of plenty: a story of progress for generations to come” is inserted. (A century of abundance: a story of progress for future generations, in free translation). He revisits the last 100 years of unprecedented human progress and asks whether, despite all the current uncertainties, we can do it again. Or do even better.
We start with a deliberately ambitious question. What would it take for every person on Earth to live, by 2100, at least as well as someone lives in Switzerland today? Not culturally Swiss, but economically empowered, with high income, long life, solid education and social cohesion.
Achieving this would require global GDP to be about 8.5 times larger than it is today. That number alone is enough to provoke skepticism. Will we have enough energy, materials, food and innovation?
The book answers these questions systematically.
Let’s start with energy. We would need two to three times the current total and about 30 times more clean electricity. It’s a big ask, but viable with innovation and investment.
Earth’s abundance of minerals and metals is sufficient; we need to find them, extract them and process them. Recoverable lithium reserves have been growing at three times the rate needed as strong demand has spurred the active search for supply.
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We could feed up to 12 billion people with high-protein diets using the same area of land, or even less, with annual productivity increases much smaller than those achieved since the 1960s.
And innovation still has a lot of momentum left — a necessary elixir for productivity growth, which would have to accelerate to around 2.7% per year. AI, combined with other technologies, could add 0.5 to 3.4 percentage points per year by 2040, much more than general-purpose technologies of the past.
Productivity gains — many already visible — are enough to sustain this level of prosperity without depleting the planet. Zero carbon emissions by 2050 are unlikely, but as long as the fruits of growth are used to capitalize on the building blocks of a new clean energy system, global warming could be kept to around 2°C.
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Therefore, the determining constraints are not physical. They are, rather, in the hearts and minds.
Productivity does not increase by chance
It’s amazing how familiar the current moment is. Periods of great transition, between geopolitical orders, energy systems or technological platforms, have always seemed disorienting in real time. They were rarely smooth.
Yet, throughout periods of economic and social turbulence, one pattern has remained: continuous, compound productivity growth. This growth has raised wages, expanded opportunities and allowed societies to confront inequality and environmental damage rather than freeze in the face of it.
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This is highly relevant for business leaders because productivity does not increase by chance. It advances when organizations invest in better tools, systems and ways of working — often well before the returns become evident.
The underestimated role of large companies
Public debate tends to treat progress as something abstract, driven by governments, scientists or diffuse market forces. But companies are center stage, and often large innovative companies.
In the United States, approximately 80% of the productivity gains of the last decade came from just 5% of companies. They did not focus narrowly on reducing costs, but created new business models, scaled innovation, and invested amid uncertainty.
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A relatively small number of companies account for a disproportionate share of the investment that ultimately raises wages and living standards. Large companies pay, on average, 25% to 50% more than smaller ones. The world’s 250 largest companies account for about two-thirds of R&D spending.
This reality has two sides. It limits progress when large companies are hesitant to invest. But it also means that leadership decisions—made in boardrooms, not just public policy forums—have more agency than is often recognized.
Growth from a new perspective
Few topics generate as much discomfort as growth. The expansion of the last century was accompanied by real externalities: climate change, biodiversity loss and social disruption. Ignoring these costs would be irresponsible.
But the evidence also disputes a popular conclusion that growth itself is the problem. A zero-sum society has difficulty financing social spending, adapting to demographic aging or investing in cleaner technologies. Productivity-led growth creates the resources needed to meet these challenges.
The choice is not between growth and responsibility. It is between productive growth and stagnation.
This distinction matters to boards weighing long-term investment decisions under pressure from multiple stakeholders. Pulling back may seem prudent in the short term, but history suggests that underinvestment during transitions is what prolongs instability rather than reducing it.
A choice, not a prediction
Our book does not predict that by 2100 we will achieve a world of abundance. He argues that this is a real possibility and that the outcome depends on the choices made now.
Still, there is a crisis of hope. Surveys suggest that in most advanced economies, fewer than one in four people believe the next generation will be better off than the last.
When belief in progress deteriorates, investment slows, risk tolerance collapses, and politics turns inward.
Business leaders cannot solve this alone. But they are not neutral actors either.
The question for boards and CEOs is not whether the world is changing, but whether they are prepared to lead through that change or allow a scarcity narrative to limit progress along the way.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary texts are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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