My observations is that our society puts too much emphasis on having people prove they are self-reliant, instead of improving its population's productivity. In this dichotomy, the former is detrimental to the society, the latter would enhance it.

I think focusing on productivity would go further than the dichotomy's of "welfare or not", where people are mostly skeptical of whether a subsidized poor person is contributing to society with taxpayer's money.

Relegating the role of governance to productivity allows even prisoner rehabilitation to change. It allows jailable offenses to be viewed under the lens of whether this is useful to the productivity of society, instead of simply punishing someone.