India, Aug. 12 -- Governments love the theatre of reform. New logos, glossy launches, ribbon-cutting ceremonies - ministers photographed signing memos as if history has just been rewritten. But spectacle and substance are not the same. I call this pattern the isometric heuristic: transformations that preserve the shape of power while creating the appearance of change.

The term comes from geometry - "isometric" means equal measure. In public policy, it's the tendency of systems to rebrand, rename or reshuffle while keeping underlying incentives and structures untouched. From the outside, things look different; inside, the machinery hums exactly as before.

This isn't just a catchy phrase. Scholars have long examined related phenomena. "In...