>A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job. >Most these individuals sat around hedonically watchi

>A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job. >Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance. Reminds me of an Onion article that's stuck in my mind: "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive" https://www.theonion.com/man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-psychologically-taxing-1843004933 https://www.theonion.com/man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-ps... It's very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren't about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn't collapse during "shut downs" of certain activities, but we can't get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice. We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID's medical specifics and surrounding culture war. For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.