In this paper, we study genuine savings as an indicator of long term welfare for Sweden for the period 1850 to 2000. Sweden has developed long series of comprehensive “green” national accounts for this entire period and is therefore interesting as a testing ground for the hypotheses linking green accounting and sustainability. We find support for the weakest of the hypotheses in the theoretical literature on weak sustainability and genuine savings, that genuine savings is correlated with future economic well-being. However, we find little support for any of the stronger hypotheses in the literature; there is no one-to-one relationship between genuine savings and prosperity, there is no indication that the relationship becomes stronger for longer time horizons, and other hypotheses linked to this literature are also rejected. The findings suggest that genuine savings, at least as currently measured in national accounts and satellite accounts, may not be a good predictor of future prosperity.