Comment by ttyprintk

That’s a good point and I don’t know how “The purpose of a system is what it does“ reacts to change in a system.

Or what to call the side-effects of a system going away.

One of the statistics I read was that the average American judges foreign aid at 31% of the Federal budget instead of the true 1%. In one way, that’s remarkable efficiency: 31x perception. In another way, it gives bad actors in the government an advantage: by cutting a measly 1%, you can rely on uninformed Americans to give you credit for 31x cuts.