Aug 14, 2026 · 52 min · 10 segments
Chris Bradley, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, tells Claire Lehmann that Australia has had almost zero productivity growth for a decade—and that the cause isn't mysterious. We stopped…
Claire LehmannHostSo let me simplify it because there's eight components, but the real idea is if you think of like a giant statue and it's firm and it stands on a plinth of trust, like you've got to have trust, and then it's got two big legs.
Or if you think about it this way, like the average person on the planet uses 1.8 tonnes of crude equivalent per year.
Whichever way you put it, that Might be if you tried to convert that into human work, that's about 45,000 hours of work.
And many people think, oh, that's a bit of a, what do you mean capital per worker? We literally just mean stuff, equipment, tools that you have to work with.
And if you account for the fact that we actually have nine times more workers than we did in 19... 25, that means we've got 81 times, like nine times nine, you know, 81 times more capital.
And so the system of economics that produced this growth, it never happened before in human history, really is about how did we get a system that could amass that much capital, which is largely about cooperation and trust, and that much energy, which is about physics and engineering, kind of into one place.
But the number of workers actually went up nine times and that's partly farms.
So let me simplify it because there's eight components, but the real idea is if you think of like a giant statue and it's firm and it stands on a plinth of trust, like you've got to have trust, and then it's got two big legs.
Or if you think about it this way, like the average person on the planet uses 1.8 tonnes of crude equivalent per year.
Whichever way you put it, that Might be if you tried to convert that into human work, that's about 45,000 hours of work.
And many people think, oh, that's a bit of a, what do you mean capital per worker? We literally just mean stuff, equipment, tools that you have to work with.
And if you account for the fact that we actually have nine times more workers than we did in 19... 25, that means we've got 81 times, like nine times nine, you know, 81 times more capital.
And so the system of economics that produced this growth, it never happened before in human history, really is about how did we get a system that could amass that much capital, which is largely about cooperation and trust, and that much energy, which is about physics and engineering, kind of into one place.
But the number of workers actually went up nine times and that's partly farms.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
