McKinsey

July 27, 2018

Weekly need-to-know content

Welcome to the Shortlist: new ideas on timely topics, plus a few insights into our people. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, scroll down for summer-reading picks from Mona Mourshed, who leads McKinsey’s social-responsibility agenda.

Seeing more electric cars on the road? Last year, sales of electric vehicles (EVs) charged forward, as environmentally minded consumers found less expensive, longer-range models on the market. In 2017, for the first time, new EV sales passed a million units globally (exhibit); by 2020, EV producers could almost quadruple that number to 4.5 million, or about 5 percent of the global light-vehicle market. And by 2030, EVs could rise to almost 20 percent of annual global sales (and almost 35 percent of sales in Europe).

Car buyers across the globe are showing interest—but at varied rates and for different reasons. In 2017, the Chinese market grew by 72 percent over 2016, partly driven by national and local subsidies. China now has a larger EV market than Europe and the United States combined. Europe’s EV market grew by nearly 40 percent in the same period, though from a smaller base and powered significantly by Germany, where EV sales more than doubled.

So watch for the market to continue to heat up—although not without some potentially surprising resource implications. Many believe the rise of EVs means we’ve hit peak oil, for example. But other factors will increase oil demand, including the chemicals and aviation industries; growth in China and other emerging markets; and the overall increase in demand for cars worldwide. EV drivers have broader access to charging infrastructure than in years past, but they’ll need many more than the 400,000 stations that currently exist. And higher EV sales will put pressure on the costs of crucial battery inputs, including cobalt and lithium.

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A fork in the road | McKinsey and the International Road Federation teamed up to study more than 20 road-infrastructure delivery systems across the world. Two key avenues for creating responsive road networks: the use of transparent selection processes and making the most of existing infrastructure.

WHAT WE’RE READING | Mona Mourshed

Mona Mourshed is the founding CEO of Generation, a nonprofit tackling youth unemployment worldwide. Generation recently won the 2018 WISE award, which recognizes innovative solutions to pressing education challenges across the globe.

Here’s what I’m reading in flight as vacation begins, with my six-year-old snoozing peacefully against my shoulder: “Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test,” in the Atlantic magazine. The famed “marshmallow test,” developed by a Stanford psychologist in the 1960s, centers on whether a child chooses immediate gratification by eating the marshmallow now or waiting to get two marshmallows later.

The test has been widely viewed as an indication of whether a child has willpower, with positive implications for education outcomes and, later, in the world of work. But the Atlantic article shows that this test is more of an assessment of socioeconomic status, favoring wealthier children whose families have the resources to feed and care for them. Poorer children often don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and so (logically) they choose to eat now.

Another plane read is “What’s going on in your child’s brain when you read them a story,” from NPR, in which researchers used MRIs to track the brain activity of four-year-olds in response to stories delivered in three conditions: audio only, illustration with audio voiceover, and an animated cartoon. The illustration medium resulted in the most connectivity between and among the brain’s networks because it provided clues that children had to work to integrate. In contrast, animation did all the heavy lifting for children and therefore resulted in much lower levels of integration.

And finally, a book for the remainder of my trip is Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies, which offers rarely chronicled personal stories of prodigies who, while extraordinarily gifted in one area, faced significant challenges in other ways. The stories offer important lessons (New York Times paywall) for how to nourish (or stifle) talent and holistic well-being in children.

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