Economic and Physical State
Why measurement is treated as infrastructure, and why the goal is minimal, purpose-limited data collection, not maximal.
Economic and physical state
You cannot control what you cannot observe.
Government never has direct access to the true system state x(t). It
has a measurement:
where h(·) is the measurement system and v(t) is noise, error and
uncertainty. A well-designed controller acting on poor measurement can
still make poor decisions — so the measurement layer is treated as
infrastructure in its own right, not an afterthought to policy design.
Modern economies already generate enormous amounts of relevant data: electronic payments, electricity meters, vehicle and building sensors, logistics tracking, digital accounting and banking systems, and an expanding Internet of Things. The proposal is not that government should collect all of it. It is that a modern economic architecture can increasingly be built around machine-readable, interoperable, verifiable information — used to construct the aggregate and distributional state estimates policy actually needs (virgin material consumption, household discretionary economic capacity, product-category waste rates, public service outcomes), while explicitly minimising what is collected about any individual. See Digital Product Identities for the clearest concrete example, and Privacy (under Governance and Safeguards) for the constraint this operates under.