Yet another article that completely ignores cost of living and cost of working to the worker.<p>&gt;  In short, if a person could earn $15k-20k&#x2F;year as a maid, they have no incentive whatsoever to actually take this job; they can also have $15-20k&#x2F;year of consumption by taking advantage of the safety net and they don&#x27;t even have to work.<p>There&#x27;s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Based on the cost of living in a certain area, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if the person decides not to work even if the job offered was in the $25k-30k&#x2F;year range, since the marginal benefits of earning an extra $10,000 do not outweigh the marginal cost of having to work as a maid for a year.<p>It is not up to an individual person to ensure that their personal utility function aligns with the supply side economics prerogative that work is somehow inherently beneficial to the worker aside from the net benefit that it provides.<p>If you want such a worker to work - create a higher wage job or create a policy that allows them to receive education to acquire such a job somewhere else. Or provide such worker a means to relocate to an area with lower cost of living, where taking a job with $10,000 marginal benefit will be sufficient to enter the workforce.