In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney used a simple yet unsettling idea—one that genuinely made the world pause and reflect.
Carney references the essay “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, in which the author describes a society sustained not by explicit force, but by the everyday acceptance of a shared lie. The central image is that of a small shopkeeper who places an ideological slogan in his storefront window not because he believes in it, but because everyone expects it to be there; the gesture expresses not conviction, but conformity. By repeating this empty ritual, the individual helps sustain an entire system based on the appearance of consensus, even when that consensus no longer truly exists. For Havel, the system’s real power lies not in direct repression, but in the fact that people begin to live “within the lie,” adjusting their behavior to preserve symbolic order. Breaking with this—removing the sign from the window—is not a grandiose act, but a deeply political one, because it exposes the system’s fragility and reintroduces truth into everyday life. Living in truth, for Havel, is not merely speaking one’s mind, but aligning action, discourse, and reality, dismantling the fiction that upholds exhausted structures.
According to Carney, the problem is that the world has spent far too long living beneath these symbolic signs—repeating narratives that no longer correspond to reality. For him, the greatest contemporary risk is not chaos, but the persistence of living within the lie.
This critique is not merely geopolitical or institutional. It strikes at the very heart of modern economics. Throughout the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, various economic schools emerged precisely as reactions to the exhaustion of a classical economic model centered almost exclusively on growth, profit, and accumulation. These approaches do not necessarily reject markets, but seek to redefine what value is and what the economy is ultimately for. It is within this space that the concept of prospenomics engages with these traditions, while also clearly distinguishing itself from them.
The starting point is recognizing a fundamental lie that has sustained much of dominant economic thought: the idea that individual wealth equates to collective prosperity. Wealth can exist for an individual, a company, or a narrow group without generating real prosperity. Prosperity, by definition, is a shared condition—it exists only when many prosper simultaneously. Classical liberalism fails by not creating effective mechanisms to distribute the wealth it generates. Socialism, in turn, fails even more profoundly by being unable to generate sufficient, sustainable wealth to distribute. Both, in their own ways, end up leaving the sign in the window: the promise of prosperity that never fully materializes.
The gift economy, articulated in Marcel Mauss’s classic 1925 essay, was among the first to demonstrate that economic exchange is not merely monetary. Mauss showed that in many societies, value circulates through obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate, involving prestige, honor, social bonds, and symbolic meaning. Karl Polanyi deepened this insight by arguing that the economy has always been embedded in social relations. The limitation of this approach is that it is often treated as pre-modern or incompatible with complex contemporary systems. Prospenomics appears to begin from the same intuition, but updates it for modern urban, cultural, and institutional contexts, where symbolic exchange continues to exist—albeit in disguised forms.
The economy of the common good, systematized by Christian Felber from 2010 onward, proposes evaluating companies and organizations based on social, environmental, and human criteria rather than profit alone. It represents an explicit attempt to reorganize capitalism through ethical metrics alternative to GDP. Despite its normative strength, this approach often becomes bureaucratic and technocratic. Prospenomics, by contrast, seems less concerned with universal metrics and more focused on the concrete generation of prosperity as it is lived, perceived, and shared in everyday life.
Doughnut economics, proposed by Kate Raworth, introduced a powerful image by establishing a minimum social foundation and a maximum ecological ceiling for economic activity. It shifts the debate away from the obsession with infinite growth toward systemic balance. However, it operates primarily at the macroeconomic and public policy level, devoting little attention to the symbolic, cultural, and subjective dimensions of prosperity. Prospenomics, on the other hand, appears deeply interested in how people experience, narrate, and ritualize prosperity—not merely in how it is measured.
Regenerative economics, influenced by thinkers such as John Fullerton, expands the critique of extractive and linear logic by proposing economic systems that function like living ecosystems, capable of regenerating over time. Even so, it remains largely anchored in environmental and productive dimensions. Prospenomics seems to extend the idea of regeneration into cultural, symbolic, and social realms, addressing the regeneration of meaning, belonging, and recognition as well.
More recently, purpose-driven economics has gained prominence, arguing that companies and individuals prosper more when guided by a clear purpose. While relevant, this current is often absorbed into marketing and corporate discourse, becoming more narrative than a genuine structure for value circulation. Prospenomics, in contrast, does not treat purpose as a slogan, but as a structural element of the economy itself.
It is here that prospenomics distinguishes itself from all these approaches. While many seek to correct excesses within the existing economic system, it appears to propose something more radical: removing the sign from the window and redefining the very meaning of prosperity. Instead of viewing prosperity as accumulation, efficiency, or growth, it understands it as a qualified circulation of value, in which money, culture, recognition, experience, ritual, and legacy coexist.
This brings us back to Mark Carney’s warning. The world can no longer afford to live within the comfortable lie that isolated economic growth automatically produces prosperity. Prosperity is neither an abstract promise nor a discourse designed to preserve order. It is a collective condition, built over time, perceived by people, and lived through relationships. Removing the sign from the window is acknowledging that individual wealth is not enough—and that an economy only deserves its name when it creates real conditions for many to prosper together.
