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635: McKinsey Senior Partner Chris Bradley on The Real Drivers of Long-Term Economic Growth

·54 min·3 clips

Chris Bradley says the biggest mistake is treating the world as fixed when reserves keep growing.

The show opens with a familiar strategic line: without vision, people perish. Kris Bradley is introduced as a senior partner at McKinsey in Sydney and a director at the McKinsey Global Institute. The conversation then moves into history. Bradley uses the arc of family memory to connect the personal and the economic, pointing out that people often look back with nostalgia and think how good it was but miss how much has changed already. He widens the frame by naming the shocks that have shaped societies, from world wars and depressions to geopolitical crises and migration. Those events sit behind family stories, and they also sit behind the rise of the world economy. The episode settles on a basic point: progress has been real, even if it is uneven. Bradley cites numbers showing a global economy that is 24 times bigger, income per person that is six times higher, and lives that are 40 years longer. The point is not triumphalism. It is that the evidence points to a long arc of improvement that has survived plenty of setbacks. The episode then asks a harder question: what would grandchildren see if they did the same thought experiment from 2100? The possibilities stay open, from plateau and depopulation to environmental destruction and continued progress. That thought experiment becomes the spine of the discussion. It is a way to think about productivity, resilience, and the conditions that let growth last. The result is a measured episode that treats economics as a living story, asks what history teaches, and keeps coming back to what future generations may conclude.

As heard by us

A measured look at growth as real progress that is still unfinished.

The episode treats economic growth as something best read over a long arc, not a quarterly blip. Through family memory and generational reflection, it ties personal experience to the wider shift Kris Bradley describes at McKinsey and the McKinsey Global Institute: a global…

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You want a clearer way to think about long-term growth and progress.

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