Provenance as an economic lens
The framework extends the idea of traceable causal history from objects and records to economic outcomes and contributions.
Logic Page 7
Evidence Status
A serious research system must distinguish what is observed, what is inferred, what is proposed, and what has been demonstrated.
Purpose: This page supplies a claim-status vocabulary for PBS/MPS. It does not upgrade the status of any claim merely by labeling it.
Five evidence levels
- 1. Established external evidence
- A factual proposition supported by identifiable third-party research, public records, statutes, judicial decisions, or agency statements. The citation should support the proposition itself, not merely a related topic.
- 2. Author synthesis
- An interpretation that combines existing sources into a new explanatory structure. A synthesis can be rigorous without being a consensus view.
- 3. Author hypothesis
- A proposition that could be tested or challenged but has not yet been established by the material presently published.
- 4. Proposed architecture
- A design specification describing how a ledger, Oracle, attribution process, governance mechanism, or instrument could operate. Specification is not deployment.
- 5. Empirical demonstration
- A documented implementation or experiment in which inputs, methods, outputs, uncertainty, and limitations can be independently examined.
How the labels apply to PBS/MPS
Meritocratic and non-meritocratic provenance
The distinction assigns different moral significance to agency-linked inputs and antecedent conditions. It is a philosophical position, not a measured fact by definition.
Ledger, Performance Oracle, and Contribution Decomposition
The components describe a possible analytical sequence: document contribution, observe performance, estimate attributable value, and translate a resulting allocation into an economic rule.
PBS classification
Risk-capital and securities analyses in project materials are not agency classifications. Instrument terms, participants, governance, offering method, and applicable law remain fact-specific.
Production-scale validity
The public materials do not establish that contribution attribution is stable, scalable, manipulation-resistant, or administratively cost-effective across all proposed domains.
Publication rule
Every consequential public claim should identify its evidence level, source, date or version where applicable, and the condition under which its status could change.
Status: Research-governance standard proposed for the Meritocrat.org knowledge network.