A symphony needs a score — the rules that turn many independent players into harmony rather than noise. TrueSymphony's score is economic: a precise answer to why an economy full of intelligent, well-meaning people keeps producing outcomes almost no one wants. The answer is not that people break the rules. It is that the rules themselves are broken.
Modern markets are extraordinary instruments for coordinating human effort. They are also, in a specific and fixable sense, blind.
Our market system is unfit for purpose: it is blind and not efficient, with prices and valuations being wrong.
The invisible hand turns self-interest into public good — but only for things that carry a price. A factory that pollutes for free will pollute; a forest priced at zero will be cleared.
As long as pollution is free, it will be caused. As long as ecosystem services are invisible, they will be destroyed.
The cure is not to abolish the market but to give it sight. The invisible hand needs brains and a heart — and sometimes a clenched fist. The problem was never money; it is that the prices in the chain don't tell the truth.
If the disease is mispricing, the cure is true pricing: putting a price on what the market ignores, so the cost of harm is paid by those who cause it rather than exported to society or the future. It scales into a family of linked ideas, unified as True Value.
The real cost of a product, including the damage left out of the sticker.
A company's profit after accounting for the externalities it generates.
The full societal value a project creates, beyond its financial return.
These are not theory. The first working version — the Integrated Profit & Loss account — was built and applied inside a major bank over a decade ago. The policy levers are now concrete: true-price public procurement, a True Profit Tax, and the evolution of carbon border adjustment into a true-price border adjustment.
If prices are to tell the truth, our accounts must widen. Measuring all six requires impact-weighted accounting: a new bookkeeping for the 21st century, the successor to the 1933 reforms that first standardised financial disclosure.
The CFO must evolve from counting past beans to a Chief Value Officer — growing healthy soil for future beans.
True prices only bite if someone in the boardroom is accountable for them. That means rebalancing governance away from shareholders alone.
Shareholders may technically own shares — but stakeholders own the business. Shareholders put in their money; employees their talent; suppliers and customers their relationship; and society its future.
In practice this points to concrete instruments — a stakeholder advisory council, a statement of the impacts a board has weighed — and connects to the rising tide of mandatory disclosure. None of it is unprecedented: the Equator Principles, the Global Reporting Initiative and the OECD Guidelines are voluntary codes that hardened into norms, proof that finance can re-norm itself.
It would be easy to read this as anti-market ideology. It is closer to the opposite. Adam Smith wrote two books; the world remembered The Wealth of Nations and forgot The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which the same author grounded markets in fairness and the regard of others. True pricing and the six capitals are, in this reading, moral multi-capitalism for an age of consequences — not a break from Smith, but the part of him a full world can no longer afford to ignore.
This project leans on both voluntary reform and mandatory levers. Markets often punish faster than legislators correct, but markets alone have not closed the gap. The stance is both: harness market discipline, and set the rules that point it in the right direction.
Putting a credible number on lost trust or degraded soil is genuinely hard, and the methods are contested. We treat impact-weighted accounting as a fast-improving discipline, not a solved science — and would rather say so than overclaim precision the field has not yet earned.