Well, if you ever try providing clean water and medical services to one of these places, you will quickly find that your first challenge is distributing resourc

Well, if you ever try providing clean water and medical services to one of these places, you will quickly find that your first challenge is distributing resources in an efficient, non-wasteful way. And to do that, you need to take a census and find out how many people live in each area, how many are lacking service, and to what extent. And to do that, you need to have some way of counting people that both humans and computers can understand. Which brings us back to this very elegant address system.