assembly-economics/metrics/MetricsCatalog.md

Metrics Catalog v0.1

Status: exploratory. Indicators are candidates: their availability, validity and data sources still have to be checked before use.

Each GADM-0.2 stock gets a sensor bundle of four kinds of measure:

• O objective outcome
• St structural
• B behavioral
• Su subjective

Each stock also gets its main Goodhart risk: how optimizing the measure could hollow out the construct.

Rules for using the catalog:

1. No stock is reported through a single indicator.
2. When indicators in a bundle disagree, record the disagreement as a finding. Do not average it away.
3. A stock's normalization to [0, 1] in GADM is a modeling convenience. The catalog keeps the raw indicators.
4. Changes to indicators are governed like model changes: versioned, with a rationale (WS-11, governance of metrics).

Concrete sources per jurisdiction for each bundle are listed in checkpoints/IndicatorCatalog.md (v0.2).

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H — Human capability

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	healthy life expectancy; adult skills proficiency (literacy, numeracy, problem solving)
St	coverage of education, care and lifelong-learning provision; mentoring and apprenticeship capacity
B	participation in learning after formal education; skill use at work and outside it
Su	self-assessed capability to learn and to act on one's goals

Goodhart risk: credential inflation. Counting certificates instead of usable capability. Organism-assisted performance can mask deskilling (link #40), so measure unassisted capability as well.

X — Assembly commons

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	reuse rate of open components (dependents per open package, citations of open datasets)
St	share of critical infrastructure under open standards; share of openly licensed publicly funded research and software
B	contribution and maintenance activity in commons projects; maintainer continuity
Su	practitioners' perceived ease of building on existing components

Goodhart risk: publishing without maintenance. Counting released artifacts rather than reusable, maintained ones. Enclosure through dependence on a single steward.

K_phys / K_Ω — Productive capacity and organism capability

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	sustainable output per unit of physical throughput; task coverage of information organisms
St	installed automation and compute capacity; number of independent organism lineages
B	utilization rates; rate at which organisms are adopted into workflows
Su	users' assessment of organism usefulness and reliability

Goodhart risk: capacity without access. K can rise while effective agency falls (automated-capitalism scenario). Always report K together with B (claims breadth) and P.

F — Risk capacity

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	business formation rate; survival-adjusted re-entry rate after failure
St	availability of staged finance, insurance and public risk pools; bankruptcy regime leniency
B	share of first-time founders without inherited wealth
Su	perceived personal downside of a failed venture

Goodhart risk: subsidized waste. Raising experiment counts while externalizing harm. Pair with externalized-harm measures (constitutional floor in GADM-0.1 § 21).

G — Effective agency

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	restartability (time × cost × re-entry restrictions, GADM-0.1 § 12); economic mobility
St	exit options: provider switching costs, data and organism portability, membrane control held by users
B	actual switching, relocation and career-change rates
Su	perceived agency and perceived range of reachable futures

Goodhart risk: formal options without real reach. Measures of legal freedom that ignore material reachability. Organism "access" counted without asking who controls the membrane (link #41).

N — Diversity & composability

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	diversity of firms, products and lineages (entropy measures); interoperability test pass rates
St	standards coverage; market concentration per component class
B	cross-vendor recombination: products built from components of several sources
Su	developers' and founders' perceived lock-in

Goodhart risk: fragmentation counted as diversity. Variety without composability. Report both halves; GADM treats them jointly for this reason.

Q — Epistemic capacity

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	correction latency (time from error to public correction); forecast accuracy; reproducibility rates
St	independent audit coverage; public access to evidence; concentration of information channels
B	share of AI-mediated decisions with retrievable provenance and explanation
Su	trust calibration: does trust track actual reliability?

Goodhart risk: measuring trust instead of trustworthiness. High trust in unreliable sources scores well on naive measures. Use calibration, not levels.

P — Domination concentration

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	ownership and market concentration (e.g. Herfindahl–Hirschman indices); concentration of lineage ownership
St	infrastructure, discovery and identity dependency; share of membranes controlled by a few operators
B	rate of self-preferencing and exclusion events
Su	perceived ability to contest decisions by dominant actors

Reporting requirement (GADM-0.3): report domination per channel (market, infrastructure, discovery/attention, membrane, lineage, political), not only in aggregate. In GADM-0.3, a single dominant channel (discovery at 0.80) coexisted with an aggregate P of only 0.32 (models/GADM-0.3.md § 2.6).

Goodhart risk: measuring wealth instead of power. GADM models power separately from wealth: control of discovery, membranes and infrastructure can be extreme at moderate wealth concentration.

E — Ecological headroom

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	position relative to planetary boundaries; material and energy throughput
St	share of circular material flows; energy mix
B	compute energy use per unit of organism output (the metabolic draw of K_Ω)
Su	— (deliberately empty: ecological headroom is not a perception)

Goodhart risk: monetary decoupling claimed as physical decoupling. GADM-0.1 § 14 requires physical throughput, not value, as the basis.

S — Social cohesion

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	incidence of violent conflict; legitimacy of institutions in contested decisions
St	channels for voice and appeal; plurality of recognition systems
B	civic participation; peaceful resolution rates
Su	generalized trust; expectation of future participation

Goodhart risk: suppressed disagreement read as cohesion. GADM defines cohesion as continued legitimate participation under conflict.

A — Attention headroom

Kind	Candidate indicators
O	self-directed time from time-use surveys (time not claimed by work, care obligations or engineered engagement)
St	share of attention-facing services funded by engagement; default notification and interruption regimes
B	interruptions per hour; share of attention spent in self-chosen versus recommended activities
Su	perceived control over one's own attention; reported time scarcity

Goodhart risk (critical): counting captured attention as a resource. Engagement metrics measure the opposite of A. Including A in VFAC rewards extraction unless A measures unclaimed, self-directed attention (models/InformationOrganismsInGADM.md § 4.1). In GADM-0.2, omitting A understates attention harm (models/GADM-0.2.md, reading 5).

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Derived diagnostics

Diagnostic	Definition	Caveat
VFAC	geometric mean of H, X, G, N, Q, S, E, 1 − P, A	Research instrument. Equal exponents damp near-collapse of one stock, so it never replaces floor checks.
Claims breadth B	share of output reaching the broad population	Says nothing about agency (dividend-abundance reading).
Floor status	share of periods in which a constitutional floor is violated	Floors are non-tradeable; do not aggregate them into VFAC.