The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected. The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that restraint is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else. What looks like restraint from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. Put a number on restraint and it becomes a target; put a target on it and the number stops meaning what it meant.
Who should read it
The lesson is modest. Build for the person who exists, not the one in the model. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us. Put a number on restraint and it becomes a target; put a target on it and the number stops meaning what it meant.
