There's an under-appreciated connection between two of this week's big political stories - Starmer's promise to "crack down hard" on benefit fraud; and the assisted dying bill.

The link is James C. Scott's concept (pdf) of legibility, which for my purposes we can understand to mean the degree to which the state can read, and thus control, society.

A big question with the assisted dying bill is: are there sufficient safeguards against people being influenced into taking their own lives? Formally, there seem to be: the bill provides prison sentences of up to 14 years for anyone who pressurises someone to have an assisted death.

But this raises the issue of legibility: can the state read the actions of a relative who puts such pressure onto someone? Of course, a court of law should be able to detect overt coercion. But the influence can be less than that. It can take the form of subtle displays of impatience: an eyeroll, a froideur, the occasional slightly harsh word. Even if there are witnesses to these (and there often won't be) they might not seem as strong to a jury in a decontextualized courtroom as they do to the individual thus pressured. And this is not to mention the extent to which the elderly and disabled might be influenced by the general culture in which they are considered a "burden on society".

What we might have here, therefore, is a lack of legibility: the state cannot fully read the pressures upon the vulnerable. To the extent that this is the case, the bill provides insufficient protections for such people.

A similar problem of legibility afflicts benefit reform*. Now, there is some fraud: the DWP estimates that it lost £5.7bn on Universal Credit fraud last year. But if the state were to try to prevent this by having tougher criteria for claiming, it would incur three costs: an administrative burden of having bureaucrats scrutinize each claim more thoroughly; a disincentive to the genuinely hard-up to make claims; and even more anxiety heaped upon claimants (who often have mental health problems to begin with) as they navigate the harsh bureaucracy.

Legibility - the ability to read "deserving" and "undeserving" cases and to distinguish between them - is difficult. Achieving it comes at a cost. Perhaps too high a cost.

Of course, these are not the only contexts in which the question arises of how legibile is society. It occurs in almost policy areas. Can central banks read the future of inflation and output and thus stabilize inflation? Can an organization as big as the NHS be read sufficiently well to be reformed for the better? Can governments read people's responses to tax changes and so design a tax system which provides incentives to work and invest rather than merely increase tax dodging? And so on.

In our context, however, we confront another problem. In a better world we'd not need the assisted dying bill. Instead, when people had helped loved ones to die out of despair at their suffering the police would simply turn a blind eye. Humanity and professional discretion can achieve what the law cannot. This world, however, does not exist - if it ever did. Like many professionals, the police do not have much discretion - and in their case, for good reason.

The issues here are genuinely tricky ones. And like many tricky issues, they don't get the attention they should. One reason for this is that our media (and in fairness much of the public) fails to apreciate the size of what Thomas Homer Dixon called the "ingenuity gap": the gulf between the complexity and unknowability of the world and our puny knowledge of it. Instead, they have an ideology of what I've called centrist utopianism - an unquestioned belief that society is perfectible if only we had wiser people in charge.

This error is magnified by the fact that politicians, like all professionals, have professional deformation; they see the world through a distorted lens. If they are well-motivated, people enter politics because they have an inflated idea of what policy can achieve. They are therefore selected to over-estimate the extent to which society can be read and controlled - an over-estimation compounded by the tendency for all of us to be over-confident about how much we can know.

The fact that politicians and the media cannot appreciate the problem here, however, does not mean that it doesn't exist. It does. If you think there are simple answers here, you are very likely wrong.

* In fairness to the government, much of its White Paper, Get Britain Working, talks about genuine support for the out-of-work and better opportunities for training and good jobs. Insofar as this is sincere, it is to be applauded.