While I don&#x27;t really believe in the &quot;Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient&quot; (they exist, in tiny numbers, and are likely irrelevant to economic outcomes due to being rare), I don&#x27;t think this paper has proved what its title claimed. It&#x27;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.<p>To draw any conclusions about &quot;welfare recipients&quot;, 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&#x27;t happened is because nobody&#x27;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.