Almost everything the framework pays or triggers rests on a number. The floor measure decides what every person receives each month. The supply gap decides where a public builder starts building. The care gap decides how much care is paid for, and where pay rises. Sustainable output decides how much new money is issued. The concentration measures decide when a holder of scarce goods or an essential layer takes on limits.
Whoever sets those numbers holds a quiet kind of power. A floor measure nudged down by a few percent each year shrinks every person’s floor without a vote. A care gap that reads smaller than it is leaves caregivers short while the figures say all is well. That is why capturing the measurers is one of the moves of capture from inside, and why the framework never lets one body set a figure alone.
No figure that pays anyone or triggers anything is ever set by a single estimator.
The principle: pay for the work, never for agreement
Several estimators only protect anything if they are truly independent. The fastest way to destroy that is to reward them for agreeing. An estimator paid for landing near the others learns to copy the others, and soon the median is one estimate wearing several names.
So every incentive in the system rewards one of two things: doing the work openly and well, or being proven accurate later, against what actually happened. Nothing rewards closeness to the median, and nothing punishes an estimator for being an outlier who turns out to be right.
How it works, in brief
- Anyone who meets the standards can estimate. A public agency, a university center, a civic institute, or a body in another country registers as an estimator by meeting published standards of method, openness, and independence.
- Each cycle, the counted set is drawn at random from that pool, so no one knows in advance which estimators to lean on. Every accredited estimate is published, counted or not.
- The paid figure is the median of the counted estimates, with every estimate and the spread published beside it.
- Estimators are paid a base fee for every accredited estimate and a further reward for accuracy confirmed later.
- Safeguards keep the set independent: one counted estimator per controlling group, caps on any funder’s share, a required mix of kinds of estimator, correlated estimators counted as one, and an accreditor that judges only method.
The pages below
- What gets measured: every figure that uses several estimators, what it sets, and why one set of bodies can do most of the work.
- Paying the estimators: the base fee, accuracy rewards, data access, and track records, and why none of them rewards agreement.
- Keeping estimators independent: the eight safeguards and the capture each one blocks.
- When estimators disagree: how the figure is set, what a wide spread means, and what happens when too few estimates arrive.
- Building the estimators: how to get from one official number to many independent ones, and who resists and backs each step.
- Reading the twelve functions: the same pool assessing the health of the twelve functions, as a profile of conditions, never a score.
This is the working form of a rule the framework already holds: no metric receives ontological authority, and ecological accounting is done by many institutions, with their disagreement kept visible. Here it carries money, so it needs machinery.