Treating Luck as Policy Variable

Public policy should stop treating luck as mere anecdote and instead explicitly model and compensate for birth‑lottery effects (place of birth, parental status, early life exposures) when designing social insurance, immigration, and redistribution programs. That means building interventions that assume large stochastic differences in baseline opportunity rather than assuming meritocratic equality of starting conditions. — Reframing luck as an explicit policy input would change debates over welfare, migration, and education from moralizing arguments about effort to technical designs that mitigate accidental inequality.