Dental kindness leading to repentance

I recently read the book Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine about the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s. I learned that the British government purposefully chose not to provide aid to Irish farmers and their families who were starving to death. The British already had a cultural stereotype that the Irish were lazy, and because of the famine, jobs were in short supply. Many of the farmers couldn’t find employment outside of growing potatoes, which was no longer feasible. This confirmed the laziness stereotype and led the British government to conclude that if they gave out free food or money, it would further enable Irish laziness. The farmers would no longer feel the need to work. (Of course, no one raised the point that most farmers weren’t getting jobs either because jobs didn’t exist or because they and their families were starving to death.)

Since reading that book, I read about a German study, Projekt Grundeinkommen, that examined the effects of UBI (universal basic …