<p>Creative economies generate a cultural utility stock of civilisational scale — an accumulated body of work that is the primary driver of economic behaviour in sectors representing trillions in annual output — which no transaction architecture currently prices, routes capital toward, or rewards the reproduction of. Attribution failure explains why the market for this stock cannot form: platform infrastructure settles creator claims with finality at the moment of the consumption event, foreclosing contingent pricing of cultural utility that depends causally on post-transaction propagation, compounding, and downstream displacement. This is not a standard positive externality problem. It is a structural failure at the measurement layer, established here as two lemmas — settlement finality and institutional stability — that together identify why the missing market cannot form spontaneously from within the incumbent architecture.</p> <p>The paper develops three adverse selection channels through which attribution failure operates: quality substitution in the intermediate creator distribution; displacement of high-utility creators toward adjacent markets as their primary site of value capture; and capability degradation across generations as the creative inheritance depletes. These three channels are self-reinforcing and generate a formal endpoint: a creative economy fully adapted to the attribution architecture, producing high volume at low average cultural utility, with no mechanism for the frontier-expanding work from which rich creative genealogies develop.</p> <p>The solution is architectural. A capital market that prices cultural utility across time and routes returns to originators satisfies both lemmas simultaneously. The paper establishes the welfare case, identifies the instrument class, and demonstrates that the market infrastructure required does not yet exist.</p>