The most consequential policy may be the one nobody remembers choosing.

The decisions that shape most lives were often never decided. A default was set, a form was drafted a certain way, a threshold was picked to fit an old budget, and it hardened into the way things are. Because there was no debate, there is no record and no obvious place to object, and the arrangement acquires the authority of something that was simply always true.

Pick one constraint you treat as fixed and try to find out who set it and when. Often the answer is startlingly arbitrary, and that is useful information. Things that were never chosen deliberately can usually be changed more easily than things that were.