Wasn't it Seattle Pioneer who used to say, "If the government is dumb enough to give me something, I'm not going to refuse to take it"? Well, IMO that's all this woman is doing.

I daresay not even anyone on this board would refuse a handout. That's the point. Human nature is always at work, and human nature will take the path of least resistance every time. That's not what builds great countries, however, so social policies that reinforce human nature are not what make great countries.

Have you ever heard of the Ultimatum Game?

It isn't really a game, it's a set of related psychology experiments.

It works like this. People are paired up. The experimenter offers each pair $10, on this basis: one person in the pair - the "proposer" decides how to divide the $10 between them, and then the other person - the "decider" hears that decision and decides between taking the money and letting the experimenter keep it. No negotiation, just one proposal and one decision.

Obviously, the economically best division for the proposer is to weight the division heavily in his own favor - maybe $9 to $1. And the economically best choice for the decider is to take whatever is offered, because getting even one cent is economically better than getting nothing.

As long as the participants know that they are paired with a person, and it's one-on-one pairing, the large majority of proposers suggest that the decider will get between $4 and $5. And the less the proposer offers the decider, the more likely it is that the decider will choose to get nothing.

Apparently people value fairness - even in non-repeated anonymous exchanges with random strangers.

When the decider is told that their proposer is a computer, they tend more to take whatever "the computer" offers. Similarly a proposer will tend to more strongly favor himself over "the computer". Apparently they don't feel a need for or expectation of fairness in dealing with non-persons.

When the situation is modified where each proposer's proposal goes to multiple deciders until one takes it or a limit is reached, and the experiment participants know of this, proposals get tilted in the proposer's favor and all deciders are more likely to take an imbalanced proposal. Similarly, if each decider gets shown multiple proposals and can take any one or none, proposals get tilted in the decider's favor. Apparently people recognize and accept that the relatively-scarce side of the transaction is more valuable than the relatively-abundant side.

This is part of human nature too.