This book spends most of its length explaining why people behaved as they did. That is deliberate: very little here is the result of stupidity, and an account that reaches for villains explains nothing you could act on.
But explanation is not exoneration, and the epilogue insists on the distinction. Understanding why a system produces an outcome tells you what to change. It does not tell you that the outcome was compulsory.
Drift is the danger, because drift feels like neutrality. It is not. Doing nothing selects outcomes just as decisively as acting: which institutions close, which places lose their university, which subjects quietly disappear, which students discover in their second year that the promise has moved. Those are choices. They are simply being made by nobody in particular, which is the most convenient way to make them.
It has a shortage of decisions made while decisions still matter.
Regulated to Fail, Epilogue
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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