Benefit levels 'do not promote laziness', study suggests

[hunter]

8. People are social animals and don't like to be idle.

"Lazy" is a label that either blames the victim for various sorts of mental health issues (including addictions), or blames the victim for the failure of a society to provide adequate resources and opportunities for its people by discrimination based in racism, homophobia, sexism, rejection of the disabled, etc.

It takes a fairly good income to create a truly lazy person. Most truly lazy people will be found among the offspring of the wealthy.

George W. Bush seems to be a person like that; incurious, venal, intellectually lazy, a person who "failed his way to the top" by family wealth and political connections. He's a very "dim bulb" compared to Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Barak Obama. Bush may be "intelligent" but it seems he's never exercised his brains much on anything but the navigation of the Bush family's Byzantine power structures; as if he didn't want to contaminate his "beautiful mind" (in the words of his mother) with anything else.

People who are unemployed and not fearing for their lives are often the source of great innovation. J.K. Rowling would be an example of a person who created billions of dollars of economic activity because she was not otherwise occupied living on the streets, eating out of dumpsters, and dodging dangerous human predators.

Progress in our society would greatly accelerate if everyone had a safe place to live, plenty of good food to eat, appropriate health care, and ample educational and employment opportunities.