Infrastructure Determinism and Outcome Drift: An Empirical Analysis of Social Assistance and Housing Systems in Canada and the United States

This essay develops and applies the Outcome Drift Differential (ODD) framework to measure the divergence between institutional policy targets and observed outcomes across four major systems: ODSP, Ontario Works, Canadian housing policy, and U.S. housing policy. Drawing on official policy directives, administrative datasets, and national housing indicators, the paper demonstrates that persistent negative drift is not primarily a function of political will or funding levels but of infrastructural constraints embedded within administrative architectures, eligibility rules, supply systems, and legacy institutional designs. The essay advances infrastructure determinism, the principle that institutional systems behave according to their operational architectures rather than their stated intentions. As the paper states, “intentions are symbolic while infrastructures are causal” (Preface). Through cross‑system ODD calculations, the analysis shows that administrative burden, supply shortages, fragmentation, and path dependence systematically mediate implementation performance. The CERB case is used as a low‑drift comparison, illustrating how simplified infrastructures reduce divergence between intent and outcome. The paper concludes that infrastructural design—not policy aspiration—sets the feasible range of institutional performance, and that persistent drift across domains reflects structural determinants rather than program‑level variance.