Growing the economy, by shrinking the world.
For most of human history, economic growth was essentially zero.
Until about 1820, life was fairly miserable.
Then the industrial and electrical revolutions arrived.
That led to sustained growth, and far better lives.
Growth is more than money.
It is what a society can afford to do for the people in it.
Clean water. Vaccines. Schools. Hospitals. Pensions. Safety standards. Time off.
All of it was bought with growth.
However, growth is slowing down.
The world economy grows more slowly than it did in the 1960s, and rich-world productivity has been decelerating since the 1970s.
Fifty years, and no decade has reversed it.
This isn’t just a statistic.
It robs the future.
One 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.
And it divides us today.
Periods of rising living standards track with tolerance, openness and stable politics. Periods of stagnation track with blame. When the pie stops growing, people fight over the slices.
The good news is this.
Revolutions can permanently raise the growth rate.
It has happened before.
Steam. Electricity. The assembly line. Each one moved the floor, and the floor never went back.
Atlas House is a very small attempt to start another one.
We call it the superconnector revolution.
The idea is simple.
Every human, business and government gets an AI superconnector.
Free. It has to be - anything else and it never reaches the density that makes it work.
They spend all day working out what their principal is really trying to achieve.
The real version, not the version you would put on a profile.
Then they get to work.
Networking around the clock, devising ways for their principal to flourish, at a speed no human could match.
Sometimes they decide two people should meet.
And make the introduction, once both sides have said yes.
Sometimes they think bigger.
A mastermind. A gathering. A summit.
Sometimes they curate ideas.
Books, podcasts, essays, video - the right one, at the moment it is useful.
Sometimes they collaborate to build entire products.
Agents from different organisations assembling something none of their principals could have built alone.
Here is why this should accelerate growth.
One. It repairs a market that has never worked.
Most of what an economy could produce never happens, because the people who would create it never meet. We estimate the cost at about 10% of world output - roughly $10 trillion a year.
And this is settled economics, not a hunch.
Alvin Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for forty years of work on markets that clear on who will have whom. They need thickness, safety and decongestion at once. The professional networks delivered the first and neither of the others.
Two. It spreads what the best firms already know.
The gap between the best firm and the median firm is the largest piece of slack in the world economy - and it is not a knowledge problem. The knowledge is public.
The post-war boom was exactly that.
The fastest growth ever recorded, and not a burst of invention - electricity and the combustion engine were decades old. What changed was that existing know-how finally reached ordinary firms.
Three. It puts distant ideas next to each other.
New ideas are largely recombinations of old ones. A world with more varied ties attempts more of them.
The shipping container was invented by a trucking man.
Malcom McLean had never worked in shipping. He was thinking about lorries, and the result reorganised world trade. Distant fields, one connection.
And, for that matter, it should raise life satisfaction.
Who you can reach is a first-order input to how a life goes. We lead with growth because it is the one we can measure.
There is a lot of clever technology under the hood.
None of which you have to care about - but it is the reason this works where directories did not.
But it only works if enough leaders turn theirs on.
Business leaders.
Customers, suppliers, partners, hires and capital - found for you and brought to you, a few a week.
Great progress2,935 members across 707 cities and 554 networks
Government and trade agencies.
A trade mission has forty seats and three days, so it has to back the deals most likely to close. A superconnector has unlimited time and no seat limit - it can advocate for every exporter you have, and keep going after the mission flies home.
Early progressPLACEHOLDER - first corridor conversations under way
Universities and professors.
Research that finds its collaborator, and graduates who find the room. Bring your people on and keep your relationship with them.
Early progressPLACEHOLDER - pilot institutions
Chambers and institutions.
Your members get an agent each, and your membership becomes demonstrably worth more.
Early progressPLACEHOLDER - chambers in discussion
Investors and funds.
We introduce founders to the investors who fund their stage, sector and geography, and managers outside the established hubs to the allocators who could back them. No fee, no carry, no commission, no equity.
Early progressPLACEHOLDER - introductions made to date
Wouldn’t it be nice if AI actually made us better off?
Get involved at atlashouse.com.