Sovereign Advantage: The Future Belongs to Those Who Imagine It First

We Got Economics Wrong, But We Can Fix It: Rethinking Prosperity Beyond, Feudal Resource Extraction, Factories, and GDP

Making a Quilt at Home in Nova Scotia

For centuries, economic success has been measured by factories, corporations, and GDP growth. Politicians and economists tell us that prosperity comes from competing—first as nations, then as businesses, and now as individuals. But what if they’ve got it all wrong? What if the real foundation of prosperity has nothing to do with competition and everything to do with how we imagine our societies?

This essay is about rethinking what prosperity really means. It’s about moving beyond outdated economic models that focus on extraction and relentless competition and instead embracing a new model—one where households, communities, and creativity take center stage. We call this Sovereign Advantage—the idea that the future belongs not to those who compete hardest, but to those who imagine and build the best version of life for their people.

By the end of this essay, you’ll see why the dominant economic ideas of today are failing us, how we got here, and why the only way forward is to rethink our economic priorities from the ground up. Instead of racing to outcompete Toronto, Boston, or New York, what if we created a system where people actually want to live—not because it’s the most “competitive,” but because it offers the best quality of life? Let’s explore what that could look like.

Exploring The Good Life In Nova Scotia

The Origins of Economic Thinking: Factories, Efficiency, and the Comparative Advantage Trap

Economics, as we know it today, arose with the Industrial Revolution. It concerned itself with factories, raw materials, capital, machinery, and labor - and most among all those things… efficiency. From Adam Smith’s writing, we got the notion of comparative advantage—the idea that regions or nations should capitalize on their natural resources, specialize in what they do best, and trade for everything else. In his story of economics Smith proudly centred the individual and the individual firm against the world. Comparative advantage locks us into low-value, extraction-based industries. It’s passive—we just sit here and hope the world wants what we’ve got.

But something was wrong. We lost the plot. Why do we care about factories? Why do we need raw materials? Why is that iconic individual working so hard… or even at all? What is the real purpose of all this economic activity?

Economist Katrine Marçal gets at the heart of this in Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Spoiler: It was his mom. The household, not the factory, is the foundation of human prosperity. Before we settled into permanent cities, prosperous, fertile households were the basic building blocks of society—and they still are today. But comparative advantage, wedded to an undying worship of efficiency, has led us to a lopsided and terrible globalization that most in the West are waking up to realize… well, it just misses the point of things. And in the end, in spite of all the accounting, we’re not counting what counts. Little or none of the economic activity that we care about - mostly centred around the household - is counted. We’re not counting what counts.

The Rise of Competitive Advantage: Prosperity for Companies, Not People

Then we got distracted. And we got an MBA!

“National prosperity is created, not inherited,” wrote Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter in his seminal 1998 business school classic The Competitive Advantage of Nations. Porter concludes that companies, and by extension nations, achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. Their capacity and push to innovate is the key to prosperity. And, of course, this kind of prosperity is really just top-line revenue growth measured as GDP. Competitive advantage is the fundamental goal taught in business schools and the organizing principle of every MBA consultant ever minted. Innovation! World Class! These are the battle cries of the “greed is good” generation of business school graduates.

But notice the similarity to Smith and Comparative Advantage: It’s still all about companies, corporations, and business, with a big bracing dose of government as social engineering to wash it all down.

GDP growth is taken as a measure of prosperity, even as household prosperity demonstrably declines in times of rapid induced growth - and households are left to pay the bill rather than benefit. The symbol is mistaken for the thing symbolized. The means—economic competition—has been disconnected from the end goal, household prosperity, which, bizarrely, is never even discussed let alone actually measured meaningfully.

Strategic and tactical thinking has replaced imagining a vision of what we actually want. Competitive advantage is better than just exporting raw fish, but it’s still about winning, not thriving. It keeps us trapped in the GDP growth mindset instead of focusing on what actually makes life better.

The Future is Imagined Before It is Built

If we can move beyond these two paradigms—comparative and competitive advantage—we can recognize them for what they were: means to an end. But what end? What are we actually striving for?

National prosperity IS created, not inherited. It does not grow out of a country’s natural endowments, its labor pool, its interest rates, or its currency’s value, as classical economics insists. It’s made from what we dream of together.

The future is created from what we imagine. Everything we have is built from what we imagined together. And yet, today, we have completely outsourced imagination to quarterly earnings calls, strategy consultants, and bureaucrats reading from ancient economics textbooks. But there are other ideas and other visions.

Keynes and His Vision for the Future

In 1930, as the world was reeling from the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In it, he offered a bold and optimistic vision of the future: a world in which economic growth and technological advancement would allow humanity to work less, worry less, and enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Keynes predicted that within a century—by 2030—most people (that’s us!) would only need to work 15 hours a week to meet their material needs, leaving ample time for creativity, leisure, and intellectual pursuits.

But as we approach the milestone Keynes imagined, his vision seems further away than ever. Instead of more leisure, we have more overwork. Instead of financial security, we have increasing economic anxiety. What happened? Why has his promised future failed to materialize? And, perhaps most importantly, is there a way to reclaim the deeper insights of Keynes' vision?

The essay begins with a note that could have been written yesterday.

Let’s review where we are on his assumptions about the economy of 2030.

Keynes' Most Important Insights

1. The Problem of Scarcity Would be Solved – Keynes believed that continued productivity growth would eliminate the struggle for basic material needs, allowing people to focus on higher pursuits. DONE! (but not well enough distributed)

2. The Role of Technology – He anticipated automation and technological progress as key drivers of economic abundance, reducing the need for human labor. DONE! (But often put to dumb uses)

3. The Challenge of Purpose – Keynes warned that once material scarcity was conquered, society would need to answer a more difficult question: What is life for? How would people find meaning when work was no longer an economic necessity? NOT DONE!!! (We’ve lost the plot here entirely!)

4. The Persistence of “Old Adam Smith” – He recognized that while economic growth might enable abundance, human habits and cultural expectations around work and competition might prevent people from embracing a life of ease and purpose. NOT DONE!!! (That’s a key argument of this essay - we gotta get off that Comparative and Competitive Advantage dope man.)

In the nearly 100 years since Keynes wrote his essay, many economists, philosophers, and social critics have revisited his predictions:

Robert Skidelsky (Keynes’ biographer) noted that while productivity gains have been enormous, the benefits have not been evenly distributed—wealth has concentrated at the top, keeping the majority of people locked in economic insecurity.

David Graeber argued that instead of liberating people from work, capitalism has created an explosion of "bullshit jobs"—positions that serve little real purpose but keep people busy.

Mariana Mazzucato has explored how the concept of value in modern economies has been distorted—financial speculation is rewarded, while genuinely productive labor is undervalued.

Rutger Bregman has made the case for Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a way to finally deliver on Keynes’ vision of economic freedom.

Keynes’ essay forces us to ask a fundamental question: What is economic progress actually for? If the goal is simply more GDP growth, more efficiency, and more competition, then we will never reach the world he imagined. His vision of a life beyond economic struggle demands a different approach—one that moves beyond Comparative Advantage and Competitive Advantage and toward Sovereign Advantage.

Comparative Advantage keeps us trapped in resource extraction and low-value work.

Competitive Advantage keeps us in an exhausting race to outproduce and outcompete others.

This essay envisions Sovereign Advantage

What if Nova Scotia isn't special, and we stop pretending it is? Instead of chasing the same tired “competitive advantage” narrative, we could build an economic plan based on a set of deliberate values and organizing principles that actually reflect reality.

Here’s a framework for rethinking Nova Scotia’s economic destiny without the boosterism—rooted in resilience, sustainability, and real human needs rather than abstract growth metrics.

Instead of GDP, which counts everything (including useless bureaucracy and speculative finance), we shift focus to fertility in its ancient sense—how much we produce that actually sustains life.

Sovereign Advantage is about stepping off that treadmill and designing an economy that actually works for people, not just corporations and markets.

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How This Moves Us Up the Ladder

🔽 Comparative Advantage:
“We have fish. Let’s sell fish.”

🔼 Competitive Advantage:
“We have ocean tech startups! Let’s try to out-compete Boston and Norway!”

🚀 Sovereign Advantage:
“We are a place where people can live a rich, meaningful life—not a place that just tries to compete in the global rat race.”

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Stop trying to make Halifax a “world-class city.” Make it a livable, affordable, human-scaled city. Build an economy around quality of life and sustainability, not endless growth and urban bloat. Position Nova Scotia as the place where you go to escape the insanity of the modern economy—not replicate it. Instead of trying to compete in the global game of growth-at-all-costs, Nova Scotia could opt out and build something entirely different—an economy based on resilience, sustainability, and real human needs. Instead of boosterism, this is about deliberate economic design—building an economy that actually works for Nova Scotians first, rather than making them foot the bill for speculative growth schemes.

A nation, region, or province’s real advantage is what it imagines for its future—how clearly it can articulate, share, and pursue those goals. Compared to this, the means (strategies, tactics, trade policies, industrial clusters) are trivial. We need 80% of our effort to go into imagining our future, and only 20% into strategy and tactics.

This is what Walt Disney called Imagineering—and it is just as relevant to nation-building as it is to theme parks. A real economy is built first in the mind, then in the world.

Sovereign Advantage: Designing an Economy That Works for Us

So, what does this new model look like?

• Household-Centered Policy – Instead of organizing around businesses and government, we build policies that strengthen households as the core unit of economic stability.

• Post-Growth Prosperity – Instead of chasing infinite GDP growth, we measure security, resilience, and quality of life.

• Time Over Money – Instead of maximizing economic output, we build systems that allow people to live rich lives with more time for creative pursuits and less financial stress.

• Creative Sovereignty – A self-sufficient economy where culture, innovation, and imagination are the driving forces—not just efficiency.

The future of Nova Scotia—or any place that chooses to think this way—should not be about competing with Toronto or Boston. It should be about offering something they don’t have: a clear, deliberate vision of what a thriving, sane, human-centered economy actually looks like.

Nova Scotia doesn’t need to compete with Toronto or Boston. It needs to offer something they don’t have—a better, richer, slower, more self-sufficient way of life.

Instead of chasing the old models of economic development, we climb to the next level of economic thinking—where success isn’t measured in GDP but in time, relationships, self-sufficiency, and quality of life.

This isn’t just economic policy—it’s a philosophy of how we can live the good life.

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A Real-World Example of Soveriegn Advantage

Think of the Amish.

• They don’t have “competitive industries.”

• They don’t chase GDP growth.

• They don’t care what the global economy is doing—they built a self-sustaining, culturally resilient economy that gives them the life they want.

We’re not saying Nova Scotia should be Amish, but we could be just as deliberate about designing a different kind of economic future—one that prioritizes real human needs over market competition.

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We are far from Keynes' promised land, but his insights remain as relevant as ever. The tools to create a post-scarcity economy exist, but the dominant economic frameworks—comparative and competitive advantage—are holding us back. To move forward, we must embrace Sovereign Advantage, prioritizing household stability, shared prosperity, and time over relentless economic growth.

Keynes didn’t just predict an easier future—he challenged us to rethink what prosperity really means. The question now is whether we have the imagination and courage to build that future for ourselves.

Let’s stop competing. Let’s start living the Good Life.

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ACTION - It starts with economic policies centred around the power and purpose of the Household.

ON THE MADNESS OF GDP