About the World Growth Project

In 1820 around eight in ten people lived in extreme poverty, life expectancy at birth was roughly 30 years nearly everywhere, and close to half of all children died before their fifth birthday, according to Our World in Data’s long-run series. Today fewer than one in ten live in extreme poverty, life expectancy is about 73, and child mortality has fallen by more than 90%. The cause was sustained economic growth, compounding.

Growth is not really about money. It is about what a society can afford to do: clean water, vaccines, schools, hospitals, pensions, safety standards, time off. It also decides when. A middle-income economy on the current path reaches today’s western European living standards in the 2090s. Accelerate, and it happens decades sooner, to people who are already alive.

Growth is not only about how good things get. It is about how long people have to wait.

The usual objection to a growth target is that growth is weather: something that happens to an economy rather than something anyone does. The record says otherwise. Before 1800, output per person grew at about 0.05% a year on the Maddison Project’s series. Industrialisation raised it to around 1.3% by 1913. Between 1950 and 1973 the world economy grew at close to 5% a year, which is the record.

The post-war boom is the one that matters, because 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 the plumbing: trade rules that let goods move, institutions that let money move, education that let people change jobs, and a backlog of unused technology finally reaching ordinary firms.

China tells the same story, growing at roughly 9% a year for four decades without inventing its way there. So does the counter-example: world growth slowed after 1973 even as computing exploded. Invention alone does not move the rate.

We are now in a position resembling 1950. AI has made thinking cheap, and what is possible has raced ahead of what ordinary firms actually do. The constraint was never knowledge. It is whether people have the skills to use it, whether they can find the right partners and customers, whether a capable firm in one economy can prove itself to a buyer in another, and whether someone with a good idea can get the money to try it.

Those are problems of skills, relationships, trust and verification. They are all, at bottom, problems of connection, and connection is now something we can build.

Three initiatives, each aimed at one of those constraints, and each free to every member. This is the part that pays a member back directly, which is deliberate: firms will build the connective infrastructure of this economy because it is in their interest to, and our job is to make sure what is good for them compounds into growth for everyone.

• AI Superconnectors

  An agent that works for you alone, looking all day for the people and opportunities that fit what you are trying to do.

• Peer Learning

  Peer groups, courses taught by members and playbooks written by them, put in the order your goals need.

• Co-Innovation

  Members upvote the tools they wish existed. We build them in the order the network asks for them.

More are written down and not built: investor matching, the shared layers a connected economy needs for identity, reputation, contracts and payment, an annual public index of what determines growth, and advocacy for the reforms our members keep running into.

Most growth is good. Some of it is destructive, 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 off its forests. So the target has conditions. Growth that breaks them is not growth we are counting.

There are four, for now. We expect the list to be argued over and added to.

We are not asking anyone to sign anything. The conditions are conditions on the growth we count, not terms of membership. Joining commits a company to nothing. The network is worth more to every member the more members it has, and a pledge at the door is a filter on the people who most need to be inside.

We are not a growth lobby. A growth lobby argues for its members’ interests. We publish conditions that restrict them, we measure against those conditions and publish the result including where our own members fall short, and we take no fee, carry, commission or equity on any introduction we make to capital.

We are not accelerationists. Growth that shortens the future is not growth, which is why catastrophic risk is one of the four conditions rather than a footnote.

We do not think GDP is a good enough measure. It misses unpaid work, ignores distribution, and will increasingly miss value created by things that become free. That last one cuts against us. So we track physical and human quantities alongside it: kilowatt-hours, homes completed, median wages, hours of care delivered, years of healthy life.

The member is the business. A company joins when somebody signs in with their work email, and the email domain is the company’s key, so colleagues land in the same workspace without an invitation.

Membership is free and open to anyone, at any level, at any firm. Networks like this normally admit one senior person per organisation, who attends an annual dinner, which produces acquaintance among a few hundred executives and no change inside the companies they run. We would rather reach the 30-year-old engineer who will build something.

Any company in an open economy may join. A few economies are sanctioned or paused and cannot; they are absent from the index rather than listed and marked.

The economy and trade pages are built from public professional data: profiles, company pages, and who publicly comments on whom. One list names people who are not members, the internal superconnectors, and it carries a name, a headline and a profile link that are already public. Everything else about a non-member is a count.

To be left out, write to hello@b160.org. We remove the record and do not read the profile again.

The World Growth Project is built by a small team that has run global professional networks before. It is early. The economy pages are mostly empty, the first corridors are being read now, and the numbers on the home page are what we expect at launch rather than what we have counted.