A woman who has nursed her mother-in-law through four years of a stroke enters her hours the way a mason enters a wall. Nobody pays her by the hour — the income floor is not a wage — but at the district reading her care hours stand in the same column as the road repairs, and the ward walkers' rounds are budgeted from what that column shows.
how the proof runs
Care is entered on the deed ledger by the person doing it and witnessed by the household. It is never billed and never means-tested. It is counted so it can be planned for — and so that a decade of the hardest work in the country stops leaving no trace at all.
Real, from our world: unpaid care and domestic work is estimated at tens of trillions of dollars a year — a large fraction of global output, appearing in almost no national account.
Informal work
the day-labour board
At first light the board beside the west bab fills with the day's hands: who is hiring, for what, at what rate, and who worked yesterday and was paid. A labourer with no papers and no fixed address still walks away with a record — because the record belongs to him and not to whoever hired him.
how the proof runs
A day's work takes a deed the same as a season's. The aim is not to formalise the informal out of existence; it is to hand the least protected worker in the country the one thing the protected already have — something to show.
Real, from our world: informal employment accounts for roughly six in ten workers globally — the majority of all human labour, and largely undocumented.
The free commons
the open shelves & the open terminals
Every zaviya keeps terminals holding the country's public code, its lexicons and its maps — copyable, forkable, signed. A tool-maker in Kharan improves a pump design at midnight; by the next district board it is running in four valleys, and her name travels with it.
how the proof runs
A contribution to the commons is deed-signed like any other work, which is exactly how the country honours it without charging for it. The thing stays free; the making of it stays attributed. Attribution is the pay.
Real, from our world: open-source software, Wikipedia's curation and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing — infrastructure the entire paid economy stands on, given away and rarely counted.