Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient

While I don't really believe in the "Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient" (they exist, in tiny numbers, and are likely irrelevant to economic outcomes due to being rare), I don't think this paper has proved what its title claimed. It's a great piece of research, but it is fundamentally about the situation in developing nations, which are capital-poor and, precisely as we would anticipate, infusions of capital into a capital-poor economy have a strongly positive impact.

To draw any conclusions about "welfare recipients", we would need similar data and research to be done in the wealthy nations. To the best of my knowledge, the reason why this hasn't happened is because nobody's run these experiments at sufficient scale in those nations (a few uncontrolled trials have been run, but on the scale of 10-20 people, and we need thousands). We should run that experiment and find out for sure.

One issue is that it can be difficult to be both lazy and a fully engaged welfare recipient. Given the complexity of eligibility proof and maintaining eligibility for various services (social security, medicaid/medicare, food stamp policies, child welfare services, child support...) participation in the Welfare World could come to occupy all of the time and working memory of its users apart from time spent avoiding the other perils of the lower class world (drugs, evictions, crime). In a science fictionesque version, a majority of people are caught slogging through socialist welfare calculus while a select few ayn randian figures rise above and create empires of capitalism to cushion themourselves from the black hole dystopian welfare system sucking down higher and higher socioeconomic ranks. Luckily, I don't think things are that bad.

So is it a reasonable conclusion that welfare serves largely as a massive scale corporate subsidy based on this data?

If they've determined that welfare has statistically irrelevant impacts on the # of people participating in the labor force and the # of hours worked that would seem to imply that welfare recipients are still a needed part of the workforce. That would also lead one to believe that welfare is not allowing substantial lifestyle modification or opportunity for self-improvement.

I mostly view welfare recipients as rational parasites and not as lazy.

The title of the paper is misleading and the entire paper is flawed.

No one claims welfare impacts labor participation without looking at the pre-condition for receiving welfare. Surely send a check to my home every month, I wont leave my job because of that.

However if I am earning $100 and hour and if the pre-condition to get welfare check of $80 is that I should earn less than $150, will I spend time and energy upgrading my skills for a job that pays $160 ? If I am smart I wont.

It is an idiotic exercise to measure labor participation without factoring the pre-conditions for receiving welfare checks.

India's large scale MNREGS did not impact work hours of Individuals in the country. It only drove the rural wages up. The social security for uncared senior citizens in some states however tells a different story. More and more old people were dumped by their children because being uncared was a precondition for receiving welfare.

A few additional points:

1) Based on what I've read, some welfare programs originally were designed to encourage poor women to stay home and take care of their kids, as if parenting was a priority for people or our society.

2) The whole meme seems no different than the myth of the 'Welfare Queen' in the 1980s (or thereabouts). I've never seen data supporting it.

3) The premise is an assumption or fear (maybe a paranoia) that people are naturally incredibly lazy, that given the option they will do nothing with their lives, and that they are motivated only or primarily by money. I don't think that's realistic. Would you take more money to be a janitor? To watch soap operas all day? Managers who have some sophistication understand that people have intrinsic motivations unrelated to money, and in fact adding the extrinsic motivations (e.g., monetary incentives) can harm the intrinsic ones and reduce productivity. People have many limitations and motivations unrelated to money.

4) Research I encountered many years ago said that most welfare recipients don't do it for the long-term; instead people end up in the programs for short periods when needed.

5) Other research I saw more recently said a leading cause of people being in welfare programs is loss of their assets due to healthcare costs. Also, I think it's widely accepted that mental illness is a leading cause of homelessness.

6) At least a small body of research says that the most effective charity is to simply give recipients money directly; generally they use it well (and overhead is much less). See GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/).

Finally, I don't think people mean it this way, but let's step back and and think: What have we become when we respond to the weakest and poorest by persecuting them and calling them lazy.

This is a dup of a previous HN thread* which originally linked to a Vox article giving a summary of the research.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606852

Just read through Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal in 1999 and 2000. Like this article - http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm . What were the people who control capital, who control employment worrying about? That too many people who wanted to work were working. It's stated quite openly in that article and others.

What a laugh that when the people who control employment are openly working to make more people unemployed, to then take some nonsensical ideas out of Christian churches about morality and laziness, and try to delude people into thinking this applies to those they just openly worked to cause to be unemployed.

Then there's the heirs who live in mansions, who haven't worked in generations. The "job creators". Or really the parasites who expropriate so much surplus labor time from those who do work, that they spend generation to generation jetting from Aspen to Monte Carlo. These are the real parasites, not those they're openly conspiring to shove out of work, who are using food stamps to buy food.

there are two things i think worth pointing out here.

1.) the study focuses on the developing world, which is a very different environment than the developed world. as such i do not believe its conclusions can be considered to say much about that, despite the title of the submission suggesting otherwise. that 'welfare' a phenomenon of the developed world, does not go to lazy recipients.

2.) the nature of the problem of undeserving people receiving state-sponsored benefits. so i am living in the uk and i know people who receive benefits. one person i know who admits to this, imo is deserving, and they represent a small proportion of people i know who admit to receiving state funded benefits.

the people i talk about who are happy to admit to receiving help from the state tend to have more resources and support at their disposal than seems fair. they are better off than me - a single man earning ~£60k a year - /before/ they earn benefits, and these people have no problem telling me that i am /stupid/ for working hard to earn my money.

literally. i have been called /stupid/ multiple times for earning my own survival and lifestyle.

most of these people make money illegally from doing things like drug dealing, loan sharking or illegally renting out the property they own (yes you can receive support if you own £100ks worth of property - disgusting imo when that is enough worth to sell your property and survive for considerably more than a year on the earnings without working.)

they are not representative of the general case though - i think most people who receive help and actually need it would be too ashamed to admit it. but people like the ones i know, in my case, enable me to continue to have the opinion that there are people getting help who simply don't need it.

to sum up, this study does nothing to alter my opinion on the idea that state sponsored benefits are abused. its just another thing telling me that people who need help do not abuse it - but those who do not will.

I assume that the authors of the paper want to change minds; if so, they should have titled and approached this topic differently. Research shows pretty conclusively people don't change their minds when directly confronted with a conclusion contrary to their preferred one.

Instead, I would suggest titles like "How much productive work does the government subsidize for welfare recipients?" with the surprising answer inside. Or even "An analysis of lazy welfare recipients" if they're willing to take backlash from more social-aid minded colleagues who only read the title.

How many people here have any experience with or expertise with welfare programs?

Welfare is really an economic stabilizer, in the same vein as "printing money," lowering interest rates, and raising taxes.

It's a macroeconomic tool government uses to keep the economy stable. It has nothing to do with laziness.