Foundation 1

Why Provenance?

Economic outcomes have causal histories. Provenance is the proposal to make those histories analytically relevant rather than treating the current outcome alone as sufficient.

What provenance means here

In this research framework, provenance means the traceable causal history of an economic outcome: the inputs that helped produce a wage, profit, asset value, or other reward, together with an estimate of their relative contribution.

Meritocratic and non-meritocratic provenance

The framework distinguishes inputs attributed to agency, such as effort, cultivated skill, innovation, and creative judgment, from antecedent conditions the person did not choose, such as inherited resources, network position, geographic circumstance, or institutional favoritism.

Why causal history matters

A present market price can reveal what buyers and sellers currently value without, by itself, revealing how the productive capacity being priced came to exist. The provenance question is therefore historical: which inputs produced the outcome, and which of those inputs are relevant to a claim of desert?

Does this require perfect causal reconstruction?

No. The MPS foundations explicitly reject perfect provenance tracing as a requirement. The proposed standard is sufficient reliability for institutional use, with uncertainty reflected in the strength of any resulting inference or correction.