BeyondWealth: Viable Reachability, Latent Liabilities, and Generative Continuity under Deep Uncertainty

Can an economy become richer while becoming less capable of adapting to the future? This paper develops the concept of Generative Continuity to address a problem that conventional measures of output and wealth can miss: two economies may look equally productive today while possessing very different capacities to reorganize tomorrow. The framework shifts attention from what societies currently have to what they will still be able to become. It introduces a multidimensional Viable Reachability Profile describing the breadth of viable futures, diversity of adaptation paths, robustness under shocks, and the cost of reconfiguration. An analytical network counterexample shows that identical current output, asset values, capabilities, and numbers of connections do not imply identical resilience or reconfiguration capacity. Synthetic computational experiments then demonstrate how specialization, redundancy loss, resource depletion, delayed harms, cross-domain spillovers, hidden regime thresholds, and incomplete knowledge can improve present indicators while narrowing future options. A central concept is the Epistemic Liability Wedge: the gap between harms already physically committed by present activity and the subset of those harms that current science and institutions are able to recognize. This makes it possible for an economic system to account correctly for everything it currently knows and still pass substantial liabilities to the future. The paper also examines decision-making near unknown systemic boundaries. Safe learning can reveal how rapidly a system is approaching danger without identifying exactly where the critical threshold lies. Distributed and sufficiently isolated experimentation can partly overcome this problem by allowing local failure to generate information without exposing the whole system to equivalent risk. In this sense, redundancy can function not only as a resilience reserve but also as an epistemic asset. The contribution is deliberately limited. The paper does not propose another universal alternative to GDP, does not claim that all growth is destructive, and does not replace comprehensive wealth, option value, viability theory, resilience, or safe exploration. Instead, it establishes a narrower but consequential proposition: current output, wealth, and productive capabilities do not in general identify the structure of viable transformations that will remain available to future agents. Generative Continuity therefore reframes intergenerational responsibility. The question is not only how much wealth we leave behind, but whether future societies retain enough structural freedom to respond to needs, technologies, hazards, and knowledge that we cannot fully specify today. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21919494 Keywords Generative Continuity; viable reachability; future reconfigurability; intergenerational economics; sustainability; comprehensive wealth; option value; deep uncertainty; representational incompleteness; epistemic liability; latent liabilities; economic complexity; resilience; systemic risk; critical transitions; tipping points; path dependence; redundancy; adaptive capacity; safe exploration; distributed experimentation; precautionary policy; network topology; ecological economics; decision-making under uncertainty