It is easy to feel confused, even hopeless, these days about the state of the world.

Geopolitical rivalries, stress on the climate and technological threats loom large. But put yourselves in the shoes of those who lived 100 years ago, and it’s apparent that our world is unrecognizably better than it was then. We may be experiencing a crisis of hope, but our world is not hopeless. 

Count the Ways

Just look at the numbers. In 1925, global GDP per person was about $3,000 in today’s dollars, about one-seventh the current number. In 1925, roughly 60 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, on a knife edge of subsistence. Today, the figure is less than 10 percent.

This modern acceleration of income is unprecedented. From 1525 to 1825, average income hardly grew at all. Between 1825 and 1925, it grew at a rate of 0.8 percent a year, doubling incomes over the course of the century. But over the past 100 years, incomes grew at 1.9 percent a year – generating a six-fold increase. Progress was not linear, but it was relentless.

By any reasonable metric, then, the quality of life has improved to a staggering degree over the past century. One hundred years ago, one in three children died before the age of five; now the figure is below 5 percent. In 1925, only about 32 percent of people were literate; today, it’s 87 percent. On average, we outlive our 1925 counterparts by 40 years. 

Innovation, along with capital accumulation, was among the primary pistons of progress. Gas lamps gave way to smart LEDs; precision irrigation fed the world; medical technologies like antibiotics lengthened lives. Encyclopedias have been replaced by large language AI models that can answer any question you can think of. And the cost of all sorts of technology has plunged, making everything from smartphones to mRNA vaccines accessible to billions. In 1927, a three-minute transatlantic call cost about $1,400 in today’s dollars; now we can talk to virtually anyone anywhere almost for free.

Yes, We Can

The 1920s didn’t look like the starting line of a race to an amazing future, and 2026 may seem equally unpromising as the beginning of something much bigger. Our forebears could not have imagined the world we live in today, and yet it came to pass. With that in mind, we should try our best to imagine a positive future now.

We know the business of progress is unfinished. The McKinsey Global Institute gauges human progress using an “empowerment line.” Above it, people have the resources to meet their essential needs and achieve a basic level of economic security. Today, about three billion people live above that empowerment line, but 4.7 billion are still below it. So we are less than halfway to where we need to be.

We tested whether it is possible to empower everyone everywhere by 2100. We set a benchmark for success: every person on the planet should live as well as the average Swiss citizen does today, or even better. Essentially, the 1 percent of the world of today becomes the 100 percent of 2100.

Achieving this would require an economy that is about 8.5 times the size that it is today. Could the planet support that? The numbers say yes. 

Look at energy. By our calculation, a world of plenty would need two to three times as much total energy and around 30 times more electricity from low-emissions sources. That sounds audacious but energy systems have scaled quickly before – and we have the technologies, from renewables to nuclear, to make this more than possible with aggressive investment and deployment.

It’s true that electrification, housing, industry and digital infrastructure for this plentiful world would require several times more minerals and bulk materials input than are used today. But those goals are well within reach, given sufficient exploration, recycling, substitution and innovation.

Take lithium, so vital for the batteries needed for storing intermittent renewable energy. The supply of lithium has responded smartly to rising demand – recoverable reserves have more than doubled since 2010, growing nearly three times faster than what would be needed to support the forthcoming century of plenty.

By the same token, the Earth can deliver enough food to provide even 12 billion people – an upper bound we test assuming fertility rates recover – with plentiful, protein-rich diets. And it can happen without the expansion of land dedicated to crops; it would require increases in crop yields of at most 1.3 percent annually, far smaller than the pace of gains made since the 1960s.

Skeptics may argue that all this growth in energy, materials and agricultural production will surely stress the climate to intolerable limits. But while we do not believe that net-zero is likely by 2050, we are convinced that if we reinvest the proceeds of growth in clean power, we can achieve plenty for all even while limiting warming to around 2.0° Celsius above pre-industrial times.

This is no more a magic trick than the unprecedented human progress of the past 100 years. We know how the progress machine works, but we also know that sand can easily clog the works. Demographics have become a drag as fertility has declined, while geopolitics can impose formidable barriers to global commerce and collaboration. Investment has weakened, and along with it, productivity growth.

There is much to do to keep the progress machine humming. The primary risk for our collective future is not aiming too high, but in resigning ourselves to low ceilings and then discovering we have too little growth to fund the good life for most, too little green energy to decarbonize, too little trust to govern. Growth is not a vanity metric; it delivers longer lives, better health care, safer streets and more agency in how people live. Pessimism invites inaction. Optimism goads us to action.

History offers a better playbook: build productive capacity, diffuse technology fast, keep markets contestable and measure progress in lives improved. A wealthy, innovating world is the one most likely to tackle today’s problems, from anemic productivity to inequality and climate change.

If we dare to believe in a century of plenty, we have a chance of building it.