Very few of the choices that produced this crisis were announced as choices. Most were deferrals — decisions not taken, taken late, or taken in a form that let the consequences arrive after the people responsible had moved on.
This chapter names five. Freezing the price and then expressing surprise at the arithmetic. Demanding world-class research while funding it as a part-cost activity. Allowing cost shocks to arrive as though they were weather rather than policy. Treating international students as a revenue line and a political problem simultaneously. Imagining exit without building it.
Each has the same shape: an outcome that was entirely foreseeable, produced by declining to decide. Delay is not neutral. It has beneficiaries, and it has a bill, and the chapter is interested in who received which.
If they were decisions, they can be redesigned.
Regulated to Fail, Chapter 14
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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