Ecological drag is the load a system carries because some of its participants are stranded. When a capacity never comes online — sealed, starved, mispositioned, or suppressed — the surrounding ecology has to make up the difference. Other people and institutions absorb work that might have distributed naturally; one function is overloaded because another is absent.
Why it’s the hidden cost
Drag is easy to miss because it shows up everywhere except on the ledger of the person who was wasted. It appears as compensatory behavior the system must manage, as effort misallocated to poor fits, as the extra coercion needed to hold ill-fitting arrangements together, and as intelligence the field simply lacks. Reducing wasted geometry reduces drag — which is why the payoff is less a matter of idealism than of a field that needs less compensation to stay viable. See Releasing Trapped Capacity.