Spend time with senior executives today and you hear both confidence and concern. Most are not flying blind. They are thinking seriously about capital cycles, technology transitions, resilience, and long-term value creation, often under far more scrutiny than their predecessors faced.
But many admit that the environment feels harder to interpret. The long term is shifting. Assumptions that sat settled in the background—about energy, demographics, geopolitics, and productivity—are moving at the same time.
Achieving prosperity in a new era
We seem to be in uncharted territory: a new era. This is the context in which our new book, A Century of Plenty: A Story of Progress for Generations to Come, is set. It looks back at the past 100 years of unprecedented human progress, and asks whether, for all current uncertainties, we can pull it off again. Or do even better.
We begin with a deliberately ambitious question. What would it take for every person on Earth to live at least as well as someone in Switzerland does today—by 2100? Not culturally Swiss, but economically empowered with high incomes, long lives, strong education, and social cohesion.
