A plan to accelerate the global economy.
The World Growth Project is an open network of businesses from 160+ countries. Five things we are going to do, and what each one is for.
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The problem
The world economy grows more slowly than it did in the 1960s, and productivity growth across the rich world has been falling since the 1970s.
That is usually discussed as an economic statistic. It is really two things happening to people.
It robs the future. A percentage point, compounded across a working life, is the difference between a child in a middle-income economy reaching today’s western European living standards in their forties or never. Slower growth does not only mean less. It means later, to people who are already alive.
And it costs us today. Periods of rising living standards track with tolerance, openness and stable politics. Periods of stagnation track with blame and zero-sum politics. When the pie stops growing, people fight over the slices.
Stagnation is not a neutral outcome that happens to an economy. It is the result of choices, which means different choices produce a different result.
So here is the plan.
Two traders, one crowd, and each holding what the other came for.
Accelerate diffusion
Give every business an AI Chief Growth Officer, free, whose only job is to get modern practice into the hands of the people doing the work.
The fastest growth the world has ever recorded was between 1950 and 1973, and it was not caused by a burst of invention. Electricity, the internal combustion engine, industrial chemistry and the telephone had all been discovered decades earlier. What changed was that they finally reached ordinary firms in ordinary economies.
The same gap is open now and it is wider. The most productive firms in most industries have pulled away from everybody else, and the distance between what the best firms do and what the median firm does is the single largest piece of slack in the world economy. Nothing about that gap is a knowledge problem. The knowledge is public.
So every member business gets a Chief Growth Officer. Not a course and not a chatbot. An agent that knows your company, your market and your people, and works on one thing: finding the practice or the tool that would change a specific job, and teaching it to the person doing that job, in the way that person learns.
Personal tutoring has always been among the most effective things known in education, and has always been too expensive to give to everybody. It is not any more.
The gap is not what is known. It is who is using it.
Flood the world with superconnectors
Every member gets an agent whose job is the introduction that should already have happened, and never did.
Commodity markets clear on price. Matching markets clear on price and on who will have whom, and business relationships are the second kind. They clear badly, and they fail in a way nobody measures: a partnership that does not form is not lost to a competitor, it does not happen at all, so it appears in no accounts and neither company learns what it missed.
Most companies could name five relationships that would change their year, and cannot name the people. The professional networks did not fix this. They have billions of participants, almost nobody saying what they actually need, and a volume of posts past what anybody reads.
Your Superconnector works for you and nobody else. It never passes on what you told it. Two agents compare two positions in private and return only whether there is an overlap worth a human’s time. How that works.
Make every business legible
A capable manufacturer in Ghana cannot easily prove it to a buyer in Germany. That is not a capability problem. It is an information problem, and it caps how far any small firm can sell.
Two strangers in different economies have to answer four questions before they can trade: who are you, can I believe what you claim, what happens if you cheat me, and how do I pay you. Where those cannot be answered cheaply, the trade does not happen, which is why most economic activity remains stubbornly local.
So we are building the record that answers them. Every company, readable by an agent in real time: what it does, what it has actually delivered and for whom, what it is looking for now, and where to send somebody who wants to act. Not scraped and stale, but written by the company and kept current because keeping it current brings them business.
The shared standards that made modern trade possible, from container sizes to barcodes to common contract terms, were never built by any single company and never set by treaty. They were built by whoever had the transaction volume, and adopted afterwards.
Move capital to where it is not
A founder in Nairobi, Jakarta or Warsaw with a genuinely ambitious idea has a far harder time funding the attempt than an equivalent founder in California. The world loses those experiments entirely, and nobody counts the loss.
Risk capital is extraordinarily concentrated, geographically and institutionally. The bets that produce new industries are made in a handful of places, by a handful of firms, on a narrow set of people. That is a permanent, invisible drag on how fast the world can grow.
We make three introductions, deliberately and for free. Founders anywhere in the network to investors who fund their stage, sector and geography. Fund managers outside the established hubs to the allocators who could back them. And large-scale capital to the projects that need it.
We take no fee, no carry, no commission and no equity on anything arranged through the network. Our return is the growth.
The experiments that never got funded are not in anybody’s figures.
Keep score
Nothing accelerates that nobody counts. So we publish an annual measure of how economies are doing on what actually determines growth.
Energy per person. Permitting speed. Compute access. Firm-level adoption of new tools. Contract enforcement times. Median income growth. These are the things that decide whether an economy grows, and most of them are not in any index a minister currently reads.
Independently audited from the start, because the usual way a ranking like this fails is that the body setting the target also grades itself. The first ten questions are already published, built from what business leaders in 160+ economies say in public.
What would make us stop
Most growth is good. Some of it is not, and the headline number hides the difference. Output can rise while the typical household gains nothing, while the air gets worse, or because an economy is selling its forests.
So the target has conditions: income growth for the poorest 40% has to match or beat average growth, emissions have to fall in absolute terms, nobody competes on speed at the expense of safety, and people should be able to have the families they want. Growth that breaks them is not growth we are counting. The conditions in full.
We are not asking anyone to sign anything. Joining commits a company to nothing.
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