Promise as Product: A Multiplicative Framework for Institutions, Credibility, and Systemic Constraints

Why do economies with comparable resources produce radically different outcomes? Why can forty-three years of fiscal discipline be destroyed in forty-eight hours? And why do the dominant macroeconomic frameworks consistently fail to anticipate the crises that matter most? This paper proposes that the answer lies in a single structural departure: economic promise is a product, not a sum. It is modeled as P(t) = Π(t) × Φ[I(t), C(t) | Θ(t)], where productive potential is converted into effective promise through a transformation function that depends on institutional quality, collective credibility, and systemic constraints. The multiplicative structure-the paper's foundational claim-implies that if any term tends to zero, promise tends to zero regardless of the remaining components. The paper diagnoses precisely why DSGE models fail on the cases that matter: their additive shock structure, their absence of credibility as a coordination mechanism, and their treatment of constraints as costs rather than domain conditions. Eight propositions are derived, including a falsifiable I-C divergence threshold predicting observable market stress (Proposition 7). Two original concepts are introduced: democratic lock-in and systemic credibility. A numerical illustration demonstrates that identical aggregate inputs yield radically different outputs depending on configuration-a property no additive framework can produce. The paper concludes with its own limit: the distinction between risk and uncertainty (Knight, 1921). Four Greek letters and one sign: ×