
Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient - Riseed
http://economics.mit.edu/files/10861
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606852)

~~~
Riseed
Thanks! This Vox summary is much more share-friendly.

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asuffield
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.

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medymed
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.

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Omniusaspirer
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.

~~~
SapphireSun
Here are some additional factors to consider:

Number of people being irrelevant might mean that a welfare recipient doesn't
work but enables someone else to work, or if someone doesn't get welfare, they
work, but their support is withdrawn from someone else. It could also mean
that the benefit is not enough for them to consider not working. That is to
say that their ambitions are greater than merely surviving, the enabling of
which is the foundational goal of a reasonable welfare program.

I think I would agree that welfare is a corporate subsidy in some sense, but
it covers more people than corporations would without the subsidy, including
people unable to work or for whom paid work is less beneficial than some
uncompensated task.

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tn13
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.

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hackuser
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/](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.

~~~
echlebek
> Would you take more money to be a janitor?

Yes. There is nothing wrong with being a janitor.

------
rubyfan
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606852)

~~~
Riseed
Thanks! I hadn't seen Vox article, and it didn't show up in results when I
checked for prior submissions.

------
obrero
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](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.

------
jheriko
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.

------
vessenes
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.

~~~
drapper
can you link to any such research? that's a topic I'd love to read more about,
but don't know where to start even. thx!

~~~
vessenes
Perusing Brendan Nyhan's papers will get you a lot of reading in short order:
[http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/).

This is one paper on the topic from another group:
[http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/10/12/095679761038...](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/10/12/0956797610385953.abstract)

This paper from Yale is pretty interesting:
[http://www.motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognit...](http://www.motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognition_of_scientific_consesus.pdf)

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

~~~
DanBC
I'm having meetings with local branches of the English Department for Work and
Pensions to try to get some clarification around their rules for people
claiming out of work disability benefits who also do work of various types.

The out of work disability benefits are currently Employment and Support
Allowance (contributions based), Employment and Support Allowance (income
related), and Universal Credit.

People on ESA might be in the work related activity group (can work, should
work), or the support group (probably could work at some point, or with
correct support, but DWP (and probably society) have given up on these
people).

The work might be "therapeutic activity" (a regular activity, unpaid,
organised by certain approved providers); "voluntary work" (needs to be for a
charity, or approved by DWP), "service user participation" (sometimes paid,
but not always, and this is the stuff I'm working hardest on to get some
clarification about. Many people do it, and they probably should be declaring
it in advance (disabled people need to ask permission before they do work!)
and then declaring the small amounts of income, although the rules are
unclear, or paid work.

If anyone wants to see the rules for this you can have a look at the Decision
Makers Guide and the Advice for Decision Makers. (The ADM is for Universal
Credit).

I know a bunch of people who do service user participation and they have no
idea how to declare it, and the DWP have no idea what it is (even though it's
in their rules) and so a bunch of people are inadvertently not in compliance
with the rules. That's bad enough, but when DWP change their mind they treat
the claimant as a fraudster and stop benefits, when the claimant has only ever
done exactly what they were told by DWP.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-
gu...](https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-guide-staff-
guide)

Any journos: Download the decision makers guide. Then print it all out and
stack it up. Then find a handful of real people and try to make a decision
about their case.

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belleandsebasti
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.

~~~
ethicalcrypto
We heard you the first time.

