James Manyika

But we should be clear about where that has happened.

Those billion people are mostly in China, and to some extent, India.

So while we say we've lifted people out of poverty, we should be very specific about mostly where that has happened.

There are parts of the world where that hasn't been the case, parts of Africa, other parts of Asia, and even parts of Latin America.

So this lifting people out of poverty has been relatively concentrated in China primarily, and to some extent in India.

One of the things about economics, and this is something that people like Bob Solow and others got Nobel Prizes for, if you think about what is it that drives our economic growth, if economic growth is the way we create economic surpluses that we can then all enjoy and lead to prosperity, right?

At some level, the growth desegregation models come down to two things.

Either you're expanding labor supply or you are driving productivity.

And the two of those, when they work well, combine to give you economic GDP growth.

So if you look, for example, at the last 50 years, both across the advanced economies, but even for the United States,

The picture that you see is that much of our economic growth has come roughly, so far at least, has come roughly in equal measure from two things.

One, you know, this is over the last 50 or so years.

Half of it has come from expansions in labor supply.

You can think about it as a baby boomer generation, more people entering the workforce, et cetera, et cetera.

The other half has roughly come from productivity growth.

And the two of them have combined to give us roughly the economic GDP growth that we've had.

Now, when you look forward from where we are, we're not likely to get much lift from the labor supply part of it, partly because most advanced economies are aging.

And so the contribution that's going to come from expansions in labor supply, much less.

I mean, you can think of it as kind of

a plane flying on two engines, right?