Social safety nets are designed for two populations: the chronically poor and the temporarily unemployed. A third population—capable individuals in acute economic crisis—falls through institutional gaps and dies. The author is an exceptional survivor of this structural exclusion. This paper identifies five lethal defects: (1) static assessment ignoring rate-of-change, (2) prior-year taxation accelerating collapse, (3) credit score opacity preventing defensive action, (4) administrative timescales exceeding survival timescales, and (5) institutional structures— mortgage life insurance, joint guarantees—that make suicide economically rational. These defects currently kill thousands annually. When AI-driven mass unemployment arrives—MIT's Iceberg Index shows 11.7% of U.S. labor is already displaceable—the same structures will kill millions. The window for reform is closing. Ten policy recommendations are proposed as time-buying interventions: dynamic assessment triggers, graduated support, automatic tax relief, credit transparency, same-day emergency response, cognitive-load-aware services, litigation support, mortgage insurance reform, joint guarantee abolition, and crisis protocols. A critical epistemological note: the dead cannot testify. The author survived by exceptional circumstance. Policymakers must treat observed cases as the visible fraction of a submerged crisis.
Ryuhei ISHIBASHI (2026) studied this question.