The Famine Codes didn't withhold food. They sequenced it. Before grain moved, a official sorted bodies into categories: who could swing a pickaxe, who could carry a basket, who was too shattered to do either. That last group received "gratuitous relief," the designation for people whose visible ruin exempted them from labor. Everyone else earned their calories.
The architecture survived the empire that built it. FEMA's benefit-cost analysis now performs the same operation at property scale, requiring a home to justify its own rescue before mitigation dollars arrive. Appraisal values do the classifying. In communities where decades of discriminatory valuation suppressed home prices, the formula sorts people out before anyone reviews a claim. The sequence holds: categorize the sufferer, then decide what they deserve.