Christian Ullrich
Januar 2026
This document argues that recurring failures across communities, organizations, and societies arise from structural conditions rather than from deficient culture or values. It shows that incentives, enforcement, and visibility shape behavior directly, that behavior aggregates into norms, and that culture forms after the fact as a record of what the system rewards or tolerates. Through comparative analysis and case studies, the text demonstrates that when enforcement weakens, incentives flatten, and responsibility diffuses, rational adaptation drives avoidance, free riding, and low performance, even among well-intentioned people. Cultural explanations persist because they feel intuitive and deflect attention from costly structural change, but they misidentify outcomes as causes and impede durable improvement. The document concludes that trust, motivation, and values depend on credible systems for protection and differentiation, that leaders often default to cultural language when structural levers are constrained, and that withdrawal and exit represent rational end states of misaligned systems rather than moral failure.
Across very different settings, the same pattern repeats. Neighborhoods, homeowner associations, large bureaucracies, corporations, public institutions, and even entire societies display strikingly similar failure modes. A small share of people carry most of the load. A larger share contributes little, delays decisions, avoids responsibility, or simulates activity. Friction accumulates, resentment grows, and observers begin to talk about declining culture, bad attitudes, or moral decay. The setting changes, the explanation stays the same, and it is usually wrong.
What links these environments is not shared values, background, or character. It is structure. In each case, incentives for positive behavior are weak, penalties for negative behavior are rare or slow, and responsibility is hard to attribute. Under those conditions, behavior converges toward a stable but low-performing equilibrium. People adapt to what the system rewards or tolerates, not to what it claims to value.
This is easiest to see when comparing places that look different on the surface. A high-trust neighborhood and a low-trust neighborhood may exist under the same formal laws. A motivated team and a disengaged team may sit inside the same organization. A cooperative community and a dysfunctional one may share the same rules on paper. Outcomes diverge because the effective systems differ. Enforcement varies. Expectations differ. Visibility of behavior changes. Informal consequences exist in one place and not in the other. Culture reflects those differences after the fact.
The repetition of this pattern tempts people to reach for cultural explanations. Culture feels deep, stable, and intuitive. It offers a simple answer to complex problems and shifts responsibility away from mechanisms that are costly or uncomfortable to change. But culture explains little on its own. It does not predict when behavior will change, how fast it will change, or under what conditions improvement is possible. Systems do.
When incentives align and enforcement is credible, behavior adjusts quickly, even among people assumed to lack the right values. When incentives flatten and enforcement disappears, behavior degrades just as quickly, even among people who believe they are doing the right thing. Over time, those behaviors harden into norms and get labeled as culture. The label comes late, after the system has already done its work.
The central idea of this document starts here. The recurring failures we observe across domains share a common cause. Systems shape behavior. Behavior aggregates into culture. Culture then stabilizes what the system already produced. Blaming culture mistakes the outcome for the origin and makes durable improvement harder, not easier.
Behavior does not emerge from values in isolation. It responds to incentives, constraints, and expectations about consequences. People adjust what they do based on what works, what fails, and what goes unnoticed. This adjustment happens quickly and requires no shared ideology or moral agreement. It is a practical response to the environment.
Systems shape that environment. They define which actions produce benefits, which create risk, and which carry no consequences. When effort leads to recognition, access, or advancement, effort increases. When effort changes nothing, it declines. When avoidance or delay carries less risk than action, people avoid and delay. These responses appear across settings and populations because they follow the same logic.
Enforcement plays a central role. Rules matter only to the extent that people expect them to be applied consistently and in a reasonable time frame. Selective or slow enforcement trains people to ignore rules and focus instead on managing visibility and blame. In such systems, compliance becomes performative, and outcomes suffer. The system does not fail because people reject the rules. It fails because it teaches people that the rules do not matter.
Visibility also shapes behavior. When work, decisions, and outcomes remain opaque, underperformance hides easily, and accountability weakens. When outputs become visible and ownership is clear, behavior changes even without formal rewards or penalties. Visibility reduces the space for plausible deniability and work simulation. It raises the cost of doing nothing while preserving the appearance of effort.
Intrinsic motivation exists, but it does not operate independently of the system. People internalize norms after repeated exposure to stable incentives and predictable consequences. Over time, external enforcement becomes habit, then belief. What looks like ethical behavior driven by values often reflects stored experience about what works in a given environment. When the environment changes, those beliefs erode.
The core driver of behavior is not culture, intention, or character. It is the structure of incentives, enforcement, and information that people face every day. Change those structures and behavior changes. Leave them untouched, and behavior converges toward whatever the system currently rewards or tolerates.
The population swap thought experiment tests a common intuition. If one were to exchange the population of a well-functioning society with that of a poorly functioning one, would outcomes simply reverse? Many people assume they would. They expect a capable population to quickly rebuild effective systems, while a dysfunctional population degrades them. The thought experiment appears to support culture-first explanations, but it breaks down under closer inspection.
The key mistake lies in treating populations as coordinated actors. People do not arrive as a unified group with shared authority, enforcement capacity, or legitimacy. They arrive as individuals embedded in existing institutions. Systems do not consist of knowledge or intentions alone. They rely on legal continuity, accepted chains of command, enforcement mechanisms, and accumulated records. These elements do not transfer with people, and they do not reconstitute instantly through shared understanding.
When a population enters a strong system, behavior adapts toward that system. Rules are enforced, incentives remain intact, and expectations are clear. Over time, behavior converges even if initial norms differ. When a population enters a weak system, behavior adapts downward. Effort loses its payoff, enforcement remains uncertain, and informal coping strategies dominate. In both cases, the system filters behavior faster than the population reshapes the system.
Historical and contemporary evidence aligns with this logic. Groups exposed to credible enforcement and stable incentives adjust within one generation. Groups placed in environments with weak enforcement and distorted incentives develop short-term strategies that prioritize survival and avoidance. These patterns do not require assumptions about intrinsic traits. They follow from exposure to different structures.
The thought experiment becomes trivial if one adds a hidden assumption that enforcement institutions disappear during the swap. In that case, collapse follows regardless of who arrives. This does not demonstrate cultural causation. It demonstrates that systems cannot function without enforcement capacity.
The population swap clarifies a broader point. Systems outlast populations. Behavior is plastic and conditional. Culture reflects adaptation to institutional conditions, not the other way around. Treating population characteristics as the primary cause confuses origin with persistence and obscures the mechanisms that actually produce stability or failure.
Intentions do not scale. Systems do. This distinction explains why well-meaning efforts fail so reliably when they run up against structural reality. People can intend to cooperate, act responsibly, and do the right thing. Those intentions influence behavior only as long as the surrounding system supports them. Once incentives, enforcement, and expectations move in opposite directions, intentions quickly lose force.
Systems shape behavior through consequences, not through agreement. They do not require people to share values or beliefs. They require people to anticipate what will happen if they act or do not act. When rules are applied consistently and outcomes are predictable, behavior aligns even among unwilling participants. When rules apply selectively or not at all, behavior diverges regardless of stated intentions.
This explains a common failure pattern. Organizations announce values, issue guidelines, and appeal to professionalism. Leaders ask for commitment, ownership, and responsibility. At the same time, they leave incentives flat, enforcement weak, and attribution unclear. People receive a clear signal. The system rewards caution, delay, and minimal compliance more than initiative. Rational actors adjust accordingly. The gap between stated intentions and observed behavior grows, and observers blame culture.
Intentions also fail because they depend on voluntary restraint. They assume that most people will act against their short-term interest for the sake of a shared norm. That assumption holds only in small groups with repeated interaction and immediate informal sanctions. At scale, anonymity, mobility, and role separation dissolve those constraints. Systems exist precisely to solve that coordination problem. Where systems retreat, free riding expands.
Even high-trust environments rely on this logic. What appears to be voluntary compliance usually rests on the knowledge that enforcement exists but is not used. The credible presence of consequences allows intentions to operate cheaply. Remove that backstop, and intentions erode. People who continue to comply feel exploited. People who defect face no cost. The equilibrium shifts.
The practical implication is straightforward. Efforts that target intentions without changing systems misdiagnose the problem. Training, messaging, and moral appeals may improve language and optics, but they do not alter behavior at scale. Systems beat intentions because they operate through structure, not belief. Change the structure and behavior follows. Leave the structure intact, and intentions remain performative.
Cities often contain neighborhoods that differ sharply in trust, safety, and everyday cooperation, yet operate under the same formal laws and institutions. Observers attribute these differences to culture. They point to norms, attitudes, or shared values as the primary explanation. This case shows why that conclusion misidentifies the cause.
The formal system may be identical across neighborhoods, but the effective system is not. Enforcement varies in certainty and speed. Reporting behavior differs. Informal sanctions, such as reputation, exclusion, or social pressure, operate in one area but not in another. Visibility of behavior changes with density, familiarity, and repeated interaction. These factors alter incentives even when the statute book remains the same.
In high-trust neighborhoods, residents expect rules to be applied and violations to carry consequences. They report issues, cooperate with enforcement, and impose informal costs on defectors. Because consequences are credible, most people comply voluntarily. Trust appears high because the system rarely needs to activate. In low-trust neighborhoods, enforcement feels distant or inconsistent. Reporting carries risk. Informal sanctions weaken. Under those conditions, noncompliance becomes rational and spreads.
The direction of causality matters. Trust does not produce enforcement. Enforcement produces trust. When people observe that violations go unaddressed, they quickly adjust their behavior. They withdraw cooperation, reduce reporting, and rely on private coping strategies. These adaptations accumulate and get labeled as cultural traits, even though they emerged in response to system conditions.
This case also explains why moving individuals between neighborhoods often changes behavior without changing beliefs. People adapt to local expectations. They follow rules where consequences are predictable, but ignore them when they are not. The neighborhood does not improve or degrade because of who lives there. It stabilizes around the incentives that operate in practice.
High-trust and low-trust neighborhoods illustrate a broader pattern. Culture reflects local equilibrium under an effective system. It does not independently generate that equilibrium. When enforcement credibility shifts, trust follows.
Culture does not precede behavior at scale. It forms from repeated behavior under stable conditions. When people face the same incentives, constraints, and enforcement patterns over time, their responses converge. Those converged responses later receive names such as norms, values, or culture. The label arrives after the behavior has already stabilized.
This process explains why cultural traits often appear persistent and deeply rooted. They reflect accumulated experience about what works and what fails in a given environment. If cooperation pays, people cooperate and later describe themselves as cooperative. If avoidance, delay, or extraction pays off, people adopt those strategies and later describe the environment as low-trust or dysfunctional. In both cases, culture records adaptation rather than causing it.
Culture also acts as a memory system. It stores lessons about past enforcement and incentives in simplified rules of thumb. People learn what is safe, what is risky, and what is pointless without repeatedly testing those boundaries. This reduces cognitive effort and coordination cost. It also makes cultural patterns resistant to change, even after formal rules shift. When systems change slowly or inconsistently, culture lags behind.
This lag creates confusion about causality. Observers see behavior that no longer fits current intentions or stated values and conclude that culture resists progress. In reality, culture responds rationally to uncertainty. If enforcement remains selective or reversible, people wait. They rely on the older lesson until new patterns prove durable. Culture changes only after systems demonstrate consistency over time.
Culture also reinforces existing systems. Once a behavior pattern becomes normal, social pressure and expectation reduce the need for active enforcement. This feedback stabilizes both good and bad equilibria. Effective systems benefit from lower enforcement costs. Failed systems persist because adaptation makes dysfunction tolerable enough to survive.
The critical implication is that culture cannot be engineered directly. Efforts to change culture without changing incentives and enforcement address the symptom, not the cause. Culture follows structure. When structure remains unchanged, culture returns to its prior form. When structure shifts credibly and durably, culture eventually aligns.
Understanding culture as a downstream effect clarifies both its power and its limits. It explains why cultural explanations feel intuitive and why they mislead. Culture matters, but it matters because systems teach it what to be.
Trust can reduce friction, but it cannot replace structure. It lowers the coordination cost only when people believe that defection remains bounded. Once that belief erodes, trust collapses quickly. This dynamic explains why trust-based arrangements work in small settings and fail at scale.
In small groups, repeated interaction, direct observation, and immediate informal sanctions support trust. Reputation travels fast, and exit carries cost. Under those conditions, people restrain opportunistic behavior because consequences follow directly from peers. These mechanisms resemble a system, even when no formal rules exist.
As the scale increases, those conditions weaken. Anonymity rises, interactions become infrequent, and responsibility diffuses. Informal sanctions lose force and reputation fragments. Trust now depends on assumptions about behavior rather than evidence. Without a system to back those assumptions, opportunistic behavior becomes rational and spreads.
The breakdown follows a predictable sequence. A few people exploit trust without consequence. Others observe this and adjust. Cooperative actors initially compensate, absorbing costs to preserve the norm. Over time, compensation breeds resentment and withdrawal. Trust declines not because people changed, but because the environment stopped supporting it.
High-trust societies and organizations often misinterpret their own stability. They attribute compliance to shared values while overlooking the role of credible enforcement that sits in the background. Enforcement rarely activates because it does not need to. Its presence allows trust to operate cheaply. When that backstop weakens, trust erodes even if values remain unchanged.
This pattern exposes a common error. Trust appears to be the cause of order, but it is the effect of a functioning system. Remove the system and trust decays. Restore a credible structure, and trust can reemerge. Treating trust as an independent foundation reverses cause and effect, leading to fragile designs that fail under pressure.
A homeowner association (HOA) provides a clear view of how trust and cooperation break down in the absence of an enforcement mechanism. The setting is small, familiar, and governed by shared rules on paper. It appears well-suited for norm-based coordination. In practice, the absence of consequences produces predictable failure.
The breakdown begins with minor violations. Responsibilities remain informal and voluntary. When a rule is ignored, others compensate to keep the environment functional. This compensation creates the appearance of cooperation, but it masks a deeper problem. Defection costs nothing, while compliance requires real effort. Over time, the system teaches the wrong lesson.
When violations recur, and responsibility remains unattributed, moral appeals replace structure. Neighbors appeal to fairness, decency, or shared values. These appeals work only on those already inclined to cooperate. They have no effect on defectors, but impose an additional burden on compliers. The system quietly selects against intrinsic motivation.
As compensation continues, resentment grows. Cooperative actors face a choice. They can continue absorbing costs, escalate conflict, or withdraw effort. Escalation proves unattractive because no formal process exists. Conflict becomes personal and unproductive. Withdrawal becomes the rational response. The cooperative baseline erodes, and the association deteriorates further.
Attempts to restore order through discussion or task redistribution fail for the same reason. Without binding commitments or consequences, coordination remains voluntary. Assignments exist only in name. Defection persists because the incentive structure remains unchanged. The problem does not lie in unwillingness to talk. It lies in the absence of enforcement.
This case illustrates a general mechanism. Trust and goodwill cannot sustain cooperation when repeated violations go unaddressed. Informal systems collapse once they allow exploitation without cost. The outcome often gets described as cultural decline, but the cause is structural. The association did not fail because people lacked values. It failed because it asked for values to do the work of a system.
Intrinsic motivation plays a real role in human behavior. People often act responsibly because they believe it is right, not because they expect immediate reward. This motivation reduces coordination costs and enables systems to operate with less friction. It does not, however, operate independently of structure, nor does it persist under adverse conditions.
Intrinsic motivation draws strength from experience. When people see effort rewarded, cooperation reciprocated, and violations addressed, they internalize those patterns. Over time, external enforcement turns into a habit. The behavior feels voluntary even though it rests on a history of predictable consequences. Intrinsic motivation reflects a sense of confidence that doing the right thing will not leave one exposed.
That confidence erodes when systems stop protecting cooperators. If violations go unaddressed, responsibility diffuses, and effort produces no distinction, intrinsically motivated actors absorb the cost while others do not. The imbalance remains invisible at first. Over time, it becomes salient. People reassess their behavior, not because their values changed, but because the environment no longer supports them.
The decline follows a consistent path. Initially, motivated individuals compensate for system gaps. They step in to prevent visible failure. This compensation delays collapse but worsens the incentive structure. Defection remains cheap, and cooperation becomes expensive. As the gap widens, motivated actors either burn out or withdraw. What appears as a loss of values is a rational response to persistent exploitation.
Intrinsic motivation also fails to scale. It relies on shared expectations, visibility, and informal sanctions that weaken as groups grow. At scale, systems must carry the burden of coordination. When systems retreat and organizations rely solely on motivation, they turn a strength into a liability. The most motivated become unpaid enforcers. Others adapt downward.
The key implication is not that intrinsic motivation lacks value. It is that intrinsic motivation requires protection. Systems that preserve fair outcomes allow motivation to accumulate. Systems that expose cooperators exhaust them. Once depleted, motivation does not return through appeal or exhortation. It returns only after the structure restores balance between effort and consequence.
Most large organizations do not fail suddenly. They drift. Performance erodes gradually as behavior adapts to a system that no longer differentiates between contribution and avoidance. This drift follows a consistent pattern across public institutions, corporations, and bureaucracies.
The primary driver is incentive flattening. When effort produces little additional reward, and underperformance carries little risk, behavior converges toward the minimum required to remain in good standing. People do not need to coordinate to reach this equilibrium. They observe what happens to others and adjust individually. Over time, the organization selects for caution, delay, and risk avoidance rather than delivery.
Career structures reinforce this pattern. Advancement opportunities are limited, slow, or detached from measurable output. Most people face a ceiling regardless of performance. Under those conditions, the rational strategy shifts. Visible mistakes threaten status more than invisible inaction. Saying no, raising concerns, and extending timelines become safer than making decisions. Work simulation replaces work because simulation satisfies reporting requirements without increasing exposure.
Leaders often recognize the problem but lack effective levers to address it. They cannot meaningfully promote, reassign, or remove people based on performance without triggering legal, political, or social resistance. Measurement of real contribution proves costly and contentious. As formal authority weakens, leaders resort to moral appeals, symbolic recognition, and procedural changes. These tools alter language and optics but leave incentives intact.
Culture adapts to this environment. Over time, norms emerge that reward alignment, procedural compliance, and political navigation. High performers either reduce effort, specialize in narrow safe domains, or exit. The organization stabilizes at a lower level of output that minimizes conflict and risk. Observers describe this outcome as complacency or cultural decay, but the behavior reflects rational adjustment.
Crisis temporarily interrupts the drift. When the stakes rise sharply, rules loosen, and authority concentrates. Performance improves because incentives and consequences realign. Once the crisis passes, the system reverts, and behavior follows. This cycle reinforces the illusion that motivation fluctuates, when in fact it is structure that does.
Low performance persists not because organizations lack capable people or clear missions. It persists because the system rewards survival over contribution. Without credible differentiation between effort and avoidance, drift remains the default trajectory.
Large bureaucratic organizations often settle into a stable pattern in which a minority of people produces most of the output while the majority contributes little beyond formal compliance. This equilibrium emerges reliably across sectors and countries and persists without appealing to cultural traits or attitudes.
In this environment, formal incentives for high performance remain weak. Promotions, assignments, and recognition rarely correlate tightly with observable contribution. At the same time, sanctions for underperformance apply only to extreme violations. As long as individuals remain above a low threshold of formal compliance, they face little risk. This creates a narrow band in which most people operate safely, regardless of effort.
Behavior adapts accordingly. A small group continues to deliver because of personal standards, professional pride, or intrinsic motivation. The rest optimize for survival. They avoid visible mistakes, delay decisions, simulate activity through reports and coordination, and emphasize procedural correctness over outcomes. None of this requires explicit coordination. The system teaches these strategies through observation.
Leadership constraints reinforce the pattern. Supervisors lack credible tools to differentiate meaningfully between high and low performers. Measuring real contribution proves costly and contentious. Reassigning or removing underperformers triggers resistance and consumes political capital. Leaders, therefore, rely on moral appeals, symbolic praise, or informal encouragement. These signals fail to change behavior because they do not alter consequences.
Over time, the organization stabilizes around this distribution. High performers compensate for gaps to prevent failure. Their compensation masks structural weakness and delays correction. Burnout or withdrawal eventually follows, but the equilibrium holds because replacement mechanisms do not exist. The system depends on unpaid surplus effort while discouraging broader contribution.
This case shows why the 80/20 pattern should not be treated as a natural law or cultural trait. It emerges from incentive starvation and enforcement asymmetry. Change requires structural differentiation, not exhortation. Without that, the organization continues to drift while appearing functional enough to persist.
When formal incentives fail to differentiate between contributions and avoidance, information becomes the remaining main lever. Making work visible does not change pay, rank, or authority, but it alters expectations about exposure and attribution. This shift can improve behavior even in systems where formal enforcement remains weak.
Visibility works by reducing ambiguity. When ownership, progress, and outputs remain opaque, underperformance hides easily, and work simulation flourishes. When tasks, decisions, and results become visible to peers and supervisors, avoidance carries a reputational cost. People adjust their behavior not because they receive rewards, but because concealment becomes harder.
Effective visibility focuses on output rather than activity. Status updates, meetings, and process compliance generate noise without accountability. Visible artifacts such as shared documents, clear ownership of deliverables, and explicit timelines constrain evasive behavior. Short feedback cycles further limit the ability to delay without detection.
Transparency also enables informal differentiation. Even when leaders cannot formally reward or sanction, they can allocate attention, access, and interesting work based on visible contribution. Over time, reliable contributors gain influence while others lose it. This mechanism remains informal, but it creates a real gradient that affects behavior.
Visibility has limits. When leaders ignore what they see, cynicism increases. When metrics replace judgment, people game the indicators. When transparency adds excessive overhead, work shifts toward self-reporting rather than delivery. Visibility raises the floor by reducing passive underperformance, but it does not raise the ceiling without stronger incentives.
Used carefully, visibility can serve as a partial substitute for missing levers. It does not create excellence, but it constrains dysfunction. In flat incentive environments, that constraint often represents the most practical improvement available.
Leaders often recognize performance problems long before outsiders do. They clearly see delays, uneven effort, and avoidance patterns. Yet their responses frequently center on values, culture, and motivation rather than structural change. This pattern reflects constraint, not confusion.
In many organizations, leaders lack effective levers. They cannot easily reward excellence, reassign underperformers, or impose meaningful consequences without triggering legal, political, or social resistance. Measurement of real contribution remains costly and contested. Acting directly carries personal and organizational risk. Talking carries little.
Values language fills this gap. It allows leaders to signal expectations without altering incentives. Statements about ownership, professionalism, or commitment create the appearance of action while preserving stability. They also distribute responsibility downward. If performance lags, the problem becomes attitude rather than structure.
This substitution persists because it feels constructive. Conversations about culture are inclusive, non-confrontational, and difficult to oppose publicly. They promise improvement without conflict. In practice, they change little. Behavior responds to consequences, not exhortation. When the system remains unchanged, values talk becomes background noise.
Leaders also use values to manage legitimacy. Structural enforcement exposes inequality and creates visible losers. Moral framing avoids that exposure by treating outcomes as shared responsibility. Over time, this framing erodes trust. Employees learn that stated values do not predict action and adjust behavior accordingly.
The reliance on values signals a deeper diagnosis. When leaders talk about values rather than act, it often means the system no longer permits decisive action. The language reflects the limits of authority. Without restoring credible levers, values remain symbolic, and performance continues to drift.
When systems fail to protect cooperators and cannot impose consequences on defectors, behavior converges toward two predictable responses. First comes withdrawal. Later comes exit. These responses do not reflect disengagement or spite. They reflect rational adaptation to persistent imbalance.
Withdrawal begins when motivated individuals stop compensating for system gaps. They reduce voluntary effort, decline additional responsibility, and limit contribution to formal obligations. This shift often appears abrupt, but it follows extended periods of compensation and frustration. Withdrawal is not a threat or a negotiation tactic. It is an attempt to restore balance by removing unpaid surplus effort from a system that exploits it.
Withdrawal changes system dynamics. It exposes hidden dependencies and reveals how much functionality relies on discretionary effort. At this stage, observers often interpret decline as sudden or personal. In reality, the system simply loses the buffer that masked its weaknesses. If no structural correction follows, withdrawal stabilizes as a new equilibrium with lower output.
An exit occurs when a withdrawal fails to restore balance. Individuals disengage fully by leaving roles, stepping down from responsibilities, or departing the organization entirely. Exit carries cost and therefore appears later. It represents a final assessment that continued participation offers no path to fair contribution or meaningful impact.
These outcomes feel disruptive because they make failure visible. Systems prefer silent compensation to visible withdrawal and exit. Moral narratives often emerge at this point, framing departure as disloyalty or loss of commitment. Such framing reverses causality. Exit does not cause system failure. It reveals it.
The end state of a broken system is not collapse, but persistence at low performance. The system sheds contributors until it matches its incentives. What remains is stable, predictable, and inefficient. Recovery requires a structural change that reestablishes alignment between effort and consequence. Without that change, appeals to culture or values delay correction while accelerating withdrawal and exit.
Withdrawal and exit, therefore, mark the final diagnostic signals. They indicate that the system has exhausted its internal reserves. At that point, only structural reform or replacement can alter the trajectory.