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Prosperity And Economic Growth With Chris Bradley – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1045 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Chris Bradley gets into a question that feels increasingly unfashionable in the current moment: what if the future is not something to fear, but something we still have the ability to build? That may sound almost naïve against the backdrop of climate anxiety, political polarization, demographic pressure, economic uncertainty and the general sense that everything is becoming more fragile. But Chris makes a very different case. He argues that pessimism may be understandable, but it is not destiny. Chris has spent more than twenty-five years helping organizations navigate strategy, growth and long-term transformation as a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. He also serves as a Director of the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm’s independent research arm, where he studies some of the biggest economic, technological and societal forces shaping the future.

His latest book, A Century of Plenty – A Story of Progress for Generations to Come, challenges one of today’s most common assumptions: that humanity’s best days are behind us.

What makes Chris’s argument land is that it is not optimism as mood or motivational wallpaper. It is optimism with math behind it. Drawing on years of research, he makes the case that another century of extraordinary progress is possible if we choose growth, innovation and productivity over scarcity thinking, zero-sum politics and managed decline. The core idea is not that progress happens automatically. It is that progress has always required choices, systems, ambition and belief. In this conversation, we talk about why economic growth remains one of the greatest drivers of prosperity, health, culture and opportunity, and why so many people still feel increasingly pessimistic about the future. We get into the historical forces that created unprecedented advances over the past century, the challenges ahead around demographics, energy and productivity, and why AI could become a major catalyst for renewed growth rather than simply another source of fear. Mostly, this is a conversation about the story we choose to tell ourselves about the future. If we believe decline is inevitable, we will probably design around decline. If we believe progress is possible, we may still have to do the hard work of proving it.

The episode is now live. Listen to my conversation with Chris Bradley here: Prosperity And Economic Growth With Chris Bradley – TWMJ #1045.

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.