Failure-Cost Identity

Canonical definition

The identity holding that the aggregate expenditure a community makes on Conflict is not the price of its justice, its security, or its dispute resolution, but the measured cost of its failure to hold its interfaces sub-critical. The identity rests on a derived rather than adopted baseline: no expenditure on Conflict corrects an Appetitive or Intrinsic deficit that existed before the Conflict began or that would have existed had it never begun, and none carries any party past the position held before the interface crossed the Critical Loop Gain, so the optimum expenditure is nil and every unit above nil measures the extent to which prevention did not occur. The measure counts Conflict and not friction, reads the system rather than the parties, and is a lower bound, because Intrinsic suppression is welfare never generated and Trauma is not denominated. The figure falls legitimately only where the incidence falls; a reduction achieved by declining to adjudicate conceals the cost rather than removing it.