Leading economists Mike Spence and Mohamed El-Erian talk about the “pretty complicated and disorienting environment” we face.

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward thinking podcast, co-host Michael Chui talks with A. Michael Spence, dean emeritus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College Cambridge and chief economic advisor at Allianz. Together with former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, they have leveraged decades of experience to explore the question “Is the world in a state of permacrisis?”

In this podcast, the guests touch on the following:
• How the New Zealand central bank came up with 2 percent as an arbitrary inflation target, which was then adopted by the central banks of major economies around the world.
• How the Queen of the United Kingdom asked a room full of economists why they hadn’t seen the Great Financial Crisis coming.
• How finance hijacked growth strategies, leading to 20 lost years of thinking about how to promote productivity and high, durable, inclusive growth.

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The UNDP’s Pedro Conceição talks about today’s global gridlock, uncertainty complex, and a pervasive sense of disempowerment.

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Leading economist Chad Syverson speculates about the ingredients in productivity’s secret sauce.

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward thinking podcast, co-host Janet Bush talks with Chad Syverson. Syverson is George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His work focuses on the interactions between firm structure, market structure, and productivity.

In this podcast, he covers topics including the following:

• Why productivity is important
• How the world economy is doing on productivity
• What major themes of our age, from the path to net zero to trade fragmentation and aging, could impact productivity
• The potential role of AI to change the game for productivity
• How productivity growth is diffused

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