It’s a certainty that we’ll be entering both the new year and a new Democratic administration with the American economy on its knees. We’ll return to something resembling normalcy with time, but communities across the country and the lives of millions have already been irrevocably altered. The lesson of the last financial crisis—that precarity endures for working Americans long after the markets and headline figures rebound—will have to be learned again. And the central truth of our economic system will have to be confronted afresh: Ours is an economy where profits and power accrue almost wholly to a class of owners who, as we’ve seen this year, are willing and able to work their employees quite literally to death. The fact that the Biden administration is unlikely to produce solutions that get to the heart of our national iniquities hasn’t absolved us from the responsibility of devising, discussing, and promoting solutions to them. Many of the most promising ideas in circulation now proceed from a simple principle: Our economy will continue to fail the American people until they are given more control over it.