Therefore, the policy implications are as clear as they have been for workers for some time now: we must move from a paradigm of suspicion to one of slack-creation.

Our goal should be to engineer robust error slack for every citizen. This means policies that attack the cost of basic needs: universal healthcare, together with high-quality, guaranteed public housing such as proposals in New York and efforts in California and Newport News, Virginia. It also means providing unconditional, cash-based supports that directly increase the margin for error for workers, like an expanded Child Tax Credit and a non-means tested Guaranteed Universal Basic Income.

These are not utopian luxuries. They are the foundational programs for a truly functional and free market, where rational choice is not a privilege reserved for those with disposable income.

The lesson of my research and experience is one of profound respect. The SNAP recipient is not a passive recipient of charity, a fool, or lazy. She is an expert econometrician, solving a brutal optimization problem every day with a precision that would stagger most budget analysts.

Defending and expanding the guaranteed basic needs such as climate change resilient housing, healthcare, pollution-free air, and resilient land can provide relief for millions of struggling laborers. In short, a social safety net or public social insurance to insure workers’ well-being and protect labor from unbridled private capital accumulations, intrinsic cyclical chaos, and uncertain risks is not an act of pity. It is an act of recognition, a demand that we stop punishing people for the expertise they develop in surviving an economy that fails to pay a living wage. We must build a society where financial genius is no longer a forced adaptation to scarcity, but a liberated capacity for human flourishing.