The book's argument is that this crisis was produced by defaults — by what happens automatically when nobody decides anything. Which means repair is largely a matter of changing the defaults.
This chapter is specific. Stop making erosion automatic, so that inflation cannot keep setting policy by stealth. Stop treating international students as a tap to be turned in response to unrelated political pressure. Remove the tax penalty on collaboration. Make the research subsidy visible, so that the decision to run it is at least a decision. Regulate proportionately rather than performatively. And build a restructuring regime before it is needed, rather than improvising one during a collapse with the cameras present.
None of these requires new money as its first step. Most require admitting, in public, what the current arrangement already assumes in private.
It needs to stop designing heroics into the rules.
Regulated to Fail, Chapter 18
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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