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

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.