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Scientists at Kings College London performed a longitudinal study to test the 'Pareto principle' and found that adults who were greater users of public services were most likely to have had a low score on the intelligence and impulsivity test administered at age three.
"About 20 per cent of population is using the lion's share of a wide array of public services," said Prof Terrie Moffitt, of King's College and Duke University in North Carolina. "The same people use most of the NHS, the criminal courts, insurance claims, for disabling injury, pharmaceutical prescriptions and special welfare benefits.
"If we stopped there it might be fair to think these are lazy bums who are freeloading off the taxpayer and exploiting the public purse.
"But we also went further back into their childhood and found that 20 per cent begin their lives with mild problems with brain function and brain health when they were very small children.
"Looking at health examinations really changed the whole picture. It gives you a feeling of compassion for these people as opposed to a feeling of blame.
"Being able to predict which children will struggle is an opportunity to intervene in their lives very early to attempt to change their trajectories, for everyone's benefit and could bring big returns on investment for government."
Full Paper: Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0005
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @02:16PM
These are 1920's and 1930's ideas.
Unfolding the logic behind motivation for this kind of research ("who is wrecking our society and draining its resources?") leads directly to gas chambers.
Pareto analysis is something of an tautology. You know that it has to come out true. It is wrong to use it to assign blame or remove individual freedoms.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:12PM
While it can lead to gas chambers, such an outcome is not at all inevitable.
Refusing to acknowledge reality doesn't help either. There are a class of people who are a terrible burden to society, and it's worth understanding this problem.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:36PM
While I essentially agree, and I'm interested as well as an armchair sociologist, I can't help but to think of how this will not end well. I mean, if you can reliably determine who's going to be a drain on society when they're three, why not just shoot them then and be done with it? That's not what I'd (and hopefully you too) want to use the research for, but the fact of the matter is that not everybody is Mensa material. I get the willies when I think about all the people who in let's say 100 years simply won't be able to work because you'll have to be Mensa material.
A society can survive for the most part shooting three year olds here or there that don't have good enough metrics. Even in some cultures, it's traditional to wait a week or a month before even naming a baby just in case, though three years is a bit long. It seems especially palatable to most humans if the toddlers with the poor metrics also tend to have a different skin color (belong to a different "tribe" so to speak). Society won't survive shooting 99% of toddlers whose metrics make it unlikely they'll be Mensa material when only Mensa members have the faculties to do things of value that AIs can't.
(Just picking on Mensa because it's well-known. I never tried to get an "I am smrt!" card, probably could, but don't see the value.)
Butlerian Jihad, anyone?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:48PM
I doubt we'll shoot them, but more likely, we'll continue to ignore the factors that lead to criminal behavior and recidivism and use this as an excuse to put children like that on parole prior to any actual criminal activity. And once caught, we'll keep them in the system as long as possible.
The correct solution here is to recognize that a wealthy country like the US should have a zero tolerance for poverty. There shouldn't be jobs out there paying poverty wages and individuals with health and mental health problems should be receiving the support necessary to have at least their basic needs met.
We've got more than enough wealth to pay for that without killing off the economy. And in all likelihood our stinginess with benefits is a massive drag on the economy. Just how much money do we waste on the legal system alone?
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:40PM
It's worth noting the article said mild loss in brain function. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......
I wonder what our scientific knowledge says about 1/4th to 1/5th of OUR children in the United States being malnourished? What happens when a developing brain doesn't have the nourishment it needs, or an environment free of toxins? We've setup OURSELVES for this future. It's coming already, if not already responsible for who we elected. It used to be the lead everywhere that was driving people to violent crime, now it is a brain that never had a chance becoming "burdens".
I find it interesting, if not extremely disheartening, that we speak about them as burdens and drains on society. At least the researchers are calling for compassion.
Instead, I would be calling for justice and vengeance. The families that are struggling extremely right now with material deprivation to the extent they need help are not the ones to blame. One cannot assign blame so ignorantly, arrogantly, and cruelly to people that were abused by the Elites. Was it the parents fault that jobs went to other countries forcing them to compete with wage slavery under worse conditions in those countries? Is it their fault government utterly failed them and allowed Wall Street to topple the country into ruin? Is it their fault that commodity and rent prices have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated and fallen to well below living wages? Gee, I wonder who's fault that it is......
There is a reason our children our suffering and malnourished and leading us to a bleak future. No, it is not the fault of the children, it is not poor genetics, and it is not the fault of *all* of the parents. This is the sobering moment where we are supposed to act with compassion and charity, perform some introspective analysis of ourselves, and evolve to meet the challenge of healing our people and feeding our children.
None of that has any hope of happening in our current and extremely toxic environment of hate and fear politics. Instead we are looking to classify children at the earliest as the problems and burdens for society. It won't be long till our children are taken away from us to be fed and taught like the Native American children were stolen from their parents. All in the name of protecting the children, which is so tragically ironic.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 16 2016, @12:39AM
I can't help but think that one of the reasons a lot of Americans are OK with this is that they don't see all American children as "ours". There are a lot of Americans who view the kids whose ancestors didn't come from the same general geographic region as they did as some kind of enemy who they wish would just go away, and letting their kids die off before age 8 or so is one way of accomplishing the "just go away" part.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @01:39AM
18 months ago I would've thought your statement hyperbole, almost bordering on the offensive. However, today with White Nationalists (Nazis) effectively having seized the U.S government, a hate filled culture is being exposed for what it is.
Some days I have very little hope for the human race. We're a large rock hurtling through space with billions of monkeys, most unhappy and exploited, careening towards our end, with screaming, hate-filled, sociopathic, and avaricious monkeys at the helm hoarding all the bananas.
All we can do is sip tea, have discussions with eyes wide at the horror, and face our coming end with what dignity we can muster. Considering that one of the loudest screaming monkeys in chief has no value for such things like dignity, facts, and equality, I doubt our end will be an easy one, or that any intelligence will prevail and steward us towards a brighter and more evolved future.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:03PM
There shouldn't be jobs out there paying poverty wages
So what job should a kid, still living at home, with no skills or education past "2 years of high school" get? An important step to reducing poverty is to provide an "entry ramp" so that people can easily enter the economy. Your first job ever in life should be expected to pay crap, so that vastly more employers will be willing to take the risk on you.
individuals with health and mental health problems should be receiving the support necessary to have at least their basic needs met.
Plenty of people with "problems" can still work for a living just fine. Being obese is a health "problem", but I still drag my fat ass to work.
Perhaps you meant "disability", in which case, sure, of course. But if you consider more than than a few percent of people disabled, then I think we're back to "problems".
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:02PM
Your problem here is that the US is not a wealthy country. It's a poor country with spiralling debt and crumbling infrastructure, but is also home to quite a few wealthy people / corporations. Unfortunately, those wealthy people are unwilling to share that wealth with the rest of society, instead calling that Communism. Compounding this problem, the people in a position to change that (Congress) are the very same people trying to hold onto their own wealth.
Reading a few Charles Dickens novels recently, I was struck with how similar working conditions were then compared to the US today. A sobering thought.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:47PM
The U.S. is a wealthy country where we've chosen to give tax breaks to the rich rather than pay for basic services.
We've got plenty of money to service our debt, we just continually elect crony capitalists because they're usually the only options. If you want to see crushing debt spiraling out of control, we're not a good example of that.we could have the debt paid off in a few years if we wanted to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:09PM
Civilized human beings want to live in a society that is free from the sort of viciousness that you describe; your very worry proves that there is a selective pressure to avoid the outcome you describe.
Past abuses have always been perpetrated by governments—especially when these exact "lower-order" people organize themselves enough to weasel their way into a position of power. That is to say, a free market solves a lot of these problems; that is to say, there should be pursued a culture that respects voluntary interaction between individuals, not top-down command and control. Recognizing this fact will go a long way towards establishing a robust foundation for civilized society.
Admit that like everything else, society must be allowed to evolve by variation and selection, otherwise it will necessarily become unfit for the environment and therefore dysfunctional. Maybe there are too many people; maybe a lot of these people are, in fact, undesirable to have around. Now, accepting this fact doesn't imply that you accept their slaughter; it just means that you accept the need to deal with them as a problem—you accept the fact that society must be set up to allow them to disappear through humane, gradual, voluntary attrition—until they disappear of their own happy, natural accord, like some vestigial organ being absorbed and forgotten.
If you instead subsidize these losers at the expense of winners, you'll just get more of the losers and fewer of the winners (Idiocracy). Worse still, if you lie to them about their equality, and trick them into believing that they are simply being held down arbitrarily by the higher orders, then you'll just foment a bloody uprising that can do no good, because it will be based on fantasy.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:20PM
Seems to me you're committed to the assumption that people and families on the lower end of society can't ever be helped.
I don't know that treating poverty like a heritable disease really gives us the whole picture.
(Score: 4, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:59PM
While it can lead to gas chambers, such an outcome is not at all inevitable.
Correct! One day, one of those people with low intelligence and poor impulse control could grow up to be president!
Hmm ... that could still lead to gas chambers. Never mind.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:56PM
I should mention that there's no evidence that Adolf Hitler was stupid. Nor much evidence that he was impulsive either: His political machinations, e.g. the Night of the Long Knives, were very carefully planned.
Stupid and impulsive leaders tend to cause different kinds of problems than gas chambers, like invading a country halfway around the world for no reason.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Friday December 16 2016, @05:42AM
Stupid and impulsive leaders tend to cause different kinds of problems than gas chambers, like invading a country halfway around the world for no reason.
But this is America, the land of plenty. Why can't we have both?
(Score: 2) by tisI on Friday December 16 2016, @02:53AM
But such a president need not build gas chambers but to save money, just build a wall.
New prisons and gas chambers can always come later ..
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself."
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:46PM
I do see the connection to eugenics, that tends to be mostly caused by a radical misunderstanding of the cause of such early developmental problems. And you're right that that's not a place we, as a society, want to go again.
I don't see the tautology in the wording you've given. If observational variable X at time T adequately predicts observational variable Y at time T+N, and X and Y are different, it's not tautological to relate X and Y. With the specifics of this case being X is impacted brain health, Y being net financial cost to society, and T being childhood. Could you clarify?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:12PM
But, we still have a eugenics program today; it's called Welfare: Productive people are being forced to subsidize the creation of unproductive people; unproductive people are being selected in favor of productive people.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:07PM
Ah, yes, the same anti-logic that gets us "white genocide" as a real thing.
That is not, and will never be how eugenics worked, you ignorant cretin, please stop having opinions until you can learn the most basic ideas of the subjects you discuss. Thanks, bye.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 15 2016, @06:23PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:09PM
What? Evolution is the result of variation and selection. There is variation in productivity, and Welfare is selecting those with poor productivity by subsidizing their reproduction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:46PM
u 2 dum 4 db8
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @12:41AM
Nobody is willing to let them just starve in the streets. They won't stop reproducing, either. Nobody is willing to tell them they cannot reproduce. Even if we were to assume some kind of social eugenics, nobody is willing to take their children from them as infants so they can be raised outside of the cycle of poverty.
There is no selection happening here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @04:38AM
Those choices make it selection, pal.
There are plenty of ways to reward people for choosing not to reproduce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @07:09AM
TIL every society is a eugenics society
wait for it...
TIL I am a sucker
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 16 2016, @05:51AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:27PM
The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.
In this case it is free breeding. I guess you are arguing that welfare programs are shaping genetics by making bad genes flourish, but you're just so very very wrong. There are stupid rich people, stupid successful people, and plenty of smart and capable poor people.
The great thing about reality is that it does not twist itself to match your weird ideas, so eugenics programs and research to support such is easily seen for what it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:45PM
Original poster here. What I meant with tautology of Pareto analysis is: whatever we do to "cure" the situation that it presents to us, it will still hold true that 20% of society will spend 80% of its common resources. If that was the problem, it will not go away. Whenever a metric is introduced and an ordered list created, it will have the top and the bottom. So, mentioning that in paper just makes one wonder about the line of thought of researchers.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:47PM
Ah, yeah, okay, that's completely and totally different from what I got from reading your post the first time. In which case: yeah. I can see that. If there's a Pareto distribution of something there's no reason to ever believe it's an unnatural phenomenon, or that any attempt at redress will change that distribution.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:28PM
Certainly there's a pseudo-tautological component to the existence of the Pareto principle, though confirming that that such a heuristic applies in any particular context is never tautological. Heuristics are just that - general principles with wide, but rarely universal, applicability.
Confirming the 80/20 rule applies though is only a first step - the next step, and where it starts becoming valuable, is in being able to identify and predict, the problematic 20% and direct resources accordingly. In computer programming for example a valuable rule of thumb is "don't optimize until performance profiling has identified the actual bottlenecks" - optimization is too resource intensive to waste on the 80%. On the other hand we also know that certain certain algorithms and problem types tend to be resource hogs, and have certain optimal solutions, so if you know your program is going to have to deal with those kinds of problems in performance-critical sections, you can choose data structures and high-level algorithms that will tend to minimize those problems and/or facilitate later optimization early in the design, dramatically reducing the amount of time and energy that will have to be spent on optimization later.
Similarly, assuming the validity of the study, they can now predict the most socially expensive 20% of the population, and that's the first step. If they can also figure out how to preemptively reduce those costs, perhaps through better tailored early childhood healthcare and education, then there stands to be dramatic social benefit. If you can spend twice as much on those kids early on in order to reduce their lifetime cost to society by half, you get a 40% reduction of the overall cost of social services.
That may not fundamentally change the 80/20 distribution, but it allows the government to deliver the same social benefit at 60% of the previous cost, allowing for a reduction of the tax burden and/or an increase in social benefits for everyone.
Of course it could also be abused as you suggest, but there's no reason to automatically assume it would be. Identifying the problem is always the best first step toward a solution, anything else amounts to just throwing money around and hoping something works. Ethically guiding the form of that solution is the collective responsibility of the society implementing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @01:28PM
Ethically guiding the form of that solution is the collective responsibility of the society implementing it.
That is the crux of the issue. But it is contrary to idea of freedom to interfere without consent of those who are potential objects of such intervention, just on bases "we will have to pay for you". OTOH, It would imply also that there is possible circumstance of "you rejected our help when it was easier for us to give it, now screw you" which is also unethical.
So, as soon as we try to put the price tag on humanity and solidarity, we are bound to create suffering.
I can only conclude that due to human nature and due to nature of freedom, there are problems that should not be attempted to be optimized, because we lose either way. Just draw the line and accept that it is best we can do.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 16 2016, @10:01PM
Again, you are assuming any such solution would be imposed involuntarily. I would venture a guess that most parents, faced with an offer of "we would like to give your kid to have these additional benefits, which will very likely significantly improve their health and social situation later in life" would likely accept without coercion. At least assuming it didn't involve fostering them off or subjecting them to other dubiously ethical interventions. After all, those later-life social costs are almost certainly accompanied by substantial personal costs as well, monetary and otherwise.
As for your other points, sadly, placing a price tag on human life is an essential function of government - we could easily spend the entire GDP extending one person's life a few more days or months, but it's a completely wasteful use of limited resources. Similarly, every time a safety standard is established, it at least implicitly, and often explicitly, weighs the cost of implementing the standard against the number of deaths and injuries it is intended to prevent.
I would also be interested in hearing your reasoning when saying that it would be unethical for society to refuse to pay much greater costs to fix a problem that could have been fixed cheaply had you not willfully refused earlier interventions. I can easily agree in a case like this where your parents made the call on your behalf, but the logic seems much shakier to me if you yourself willfully chose to incur those much higher expenses. In that case it seems reasonable to argue that it is you who chose an unethical path (willfully incurring great expense for others), and refusing to bear that burden is a reasonable response.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:05PM
Unfolding the logic behind motivation for this kind of research ("who is wrecking our society and draining its resources?") leads directly to gas chambers.
What is this anti-intellectual drivel? Knowledge does not lead to gas chambers, merely discovering some truth (or falsity for that matter) doesn't automatically cause you to want to commit genocide like some kind of lovecraftian horror story. But even if we assume your irrational gut feeling is correct, simply knowing these things does not really put us in any worse situation than we are before. We already know who is a "drain on society" and who isn't, if any society transformed in such a way that gas chambering the lazy and inept became viable, they would have no problem identifying who should be thrown in there.
And it's not as if gassing people requires strong academic background with years of painstaking research to discover what truly makes one an untermench. People have been on the recieving end of genocide simply for being of the wrong color or being born speaking the wrong language. Maniacal butchers aren't generally thwarted by lack of academic backing for their insane ideas[citation needed].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @01:39AM
If you take the long-term view, focusing on future generations, we can solve this with sterilization.
We can even get some near-term benefit if we sterilize the males via castration, since that reduces aggression.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 16 2016, @05:36AM
We already basically do this; it's called prison -- those males are for all practical purposes out of the breeding pool.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.