GP post was specifically about those lazy benefits claimants who don't study or do voluntary work to improve their chance of getting back to work.

Parent post correctly points out that many of those claimants were prohibited - under threat of criminal prosecution - from doing those things while claiming some benefit.

Often benefits put you in a situation where it makes no economical sense to pursue a job. I have a friend who lost her mother and had a pension that would be taken away if she got employed, but the pension itself was much bigger than she could ever dream of earning at that time (hell, it was bigger than I was earning in my first two programming jobs). So there's your incentive to go and get employed.

Or another example; until not so long ago, my mother (single parent) got social benefits that would disappear if my own personal income would exceed a particular (not very big) amount, and this would turn into a problem with paying rent and feeding her and my siblings. She also spent some time unemployed after a company she worked in went bust (the original owner died, and his son mismanaged it into the ground), because all jobs available for her wouldn't even pay enough to cover the lost benefits.

Basically, living at the lower end of income spectrum is incredibly hard, and you end up doing a lot of weird calculations. When working hard for 8+ hours a day pays you less than not working at all (and caring about your kids instead), suddenly this "laziness" becomes a perfectly rational choice.

Quite. I wouldn't call people "lazy" if they've fallen in a benefit trap. The benefits have been created with good intentions, but they have paved a road.

To be clear: I wasn't calling people claiming benefits lazy; I was saying that wozniacki was calling them lazy. I should have used scare quotes.

Clearly you didn't. Though wozniacki's message was phrased a in bit more nuanced way as well:

certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life -- I think we cannot escape the fact that this is true. Even in the wealthiest welfare states, there is poverty and unhappiness, but mostly it's not because of lack of (monetary) benefits, or access to education etc.

At least in my country (Finland), the development has been from state assistance (for instance, a tired single parent gets someone to help him/her a couple of times per week and do a bit of looking after the whole situation) to monetary payments (they get 123 € per week, which is taken away if they go to work, and they have freedom to decide what to do). And I must admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very liberal/libertarian (in the American sense) and say just giving people money and freedom is what we should do, but now I think it was a mistake. In the short term, people do hate waking up and going to work every day, even if in the long term they will live better lives if they do so.

True, but with a job, at least you're producing something. Well, there are also bullshit jobs, but I'd like to believe that most jobs still provide some kind of value in some way. The hoop jumping for the unemployed is just plain value destroying. If they could get an education or do charity work, they'd at least be doing something useful. I'd rather pay my taxes for that.