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from the better-than-growing-up-to-be-a-sink dept.
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, Informative) by looorg on Thursday December 15 2016, @02:26PM
This could be quite interesting, it could also turn out quite horribly where small children basically get doomed by statistics as in you didn't do to well at this test we gave you at age 3 and now we are forced to take action. Hopefully it would be that they get help but what kind of help? It's not like you are going to pass down usefull life advice to a toddler. Send all the bad toddlers to military school when they are bit older so they can be trained by the State? Not to mention that we can be almost certain that things happen between age 3 and 18/20 (or whatever age you are deemed to be your own person and not a child any more) that most likely have quite a lot of influence to. It's not like a three year old is some magical insight into the future.
But there is as mentioned interesting information here in that 1/5 of the population are the main users of health care, social services, insurance claims, disability, prescriptions and the criminal court and prison system. But perhaps one shouldn't be all to surprised as a lot of these things are one that somewhat leads to another - example: people that go to prison and come out will most likely need SS, these days they will also quite likely have some kind of medial diagnosis which will require them to recieve extra health care and presciptions. If they are criminals they are also then the source of a lot of insurance claims - they might not make the claims but they create them for other (ie their victims).
So if you could identify them and do something about it then that would be great. Question is what? There might be a real slippery slope as in 'We have done our test and doomed your child as a future welfare leech and problem so we are going to put an end to that now ...'
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 15 2016, @02:45PM
It's definitely a balancing act. This debate is a perhaps somewhat related to similar ones that go on about "tracking," i.e. separating kids in school by demonstrated academic ability level. On the one hand, this has benefits in ensuring that kids who need the most help are in a class where they can get it, while the more "advanced" kids don't get as bored. But on the other hand, you risk dooming kids in a lower track to staying there, because even if they're a "late bloomer" in some subject, it's often quite difficult to more upward to a higher track, since you just tend to fall further and further behind.
On even smaller levels, it's the sort of bias that has been shown again and again to happen with teachers -- teachers come to expect more from certain students, and that often reinforces itself: teachers may unintentionally be more lax in grading, or they may pay more attention to when a "good student" falls behind and give them extra help or encouragement, etc. As someone who has done quite a bit of grading, it's sometimes an eye-opening experience to read assignments "blind" with no names first. Inevitably there's a surprise somewhere -- with a student objectively doing much better or worse than you might expect.
On the other hand, one can go too far in trying to ignore such information. I have an extended family member who is mentally challenged (not severely, but enough that his best chance in life may be to do something like bag groceries at a supermarket) and suffered quite a bit from attempts to "mainstream" him in school. It just led him to NOT getting the actual attention he needed; he was often just sitting uncomprehendingly in a classroom, unable to meaningfully participate in what others were doing or thinking about.
So, I agree that the question is: are there useful interventions we can do with kids this test flags, without necessarily putting them onto a specialized "track" they can never get out of, or which they are always judged for? Unfortunately, with these sorts of things, the only way to test it probably is to experiment a bit and see how it affects the outcomes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:34PM
This is more a reflection of how poorly we do at offering children a hand up. We're so obsessed with cutting out the handouts in order to deliver tax cuts to the greedy that children that young are already effectively being relegated to the rubbish pile.
Age 3 is extremely early to be making decisions about who is and isn't going to succeed. In fact, even the more standard 1st grade testing that we do around here is at least a few years too early.
If the government would fund a decent education system and the employers would just pay people what they've earned rather than the lowest possible rate after threatening to either offshore the jobs or bring in immigrants to do the work, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
Look at the places where people on welfare work, Walmart has been one of the biggest offenders for decades. Walmart has had more than enough money to pay a living wage, but chooses to have taxpayers funding their employees via food stamps and medicaid, but it's the employees that are at fault, rather than the many employers that refuse to allow wages to rise with inflation.
Or to put it another way, if we'd spread the benefits out more widely so that parents have the resources to give their children the best shot, this situation would change as well. No longer would you be able to pin it down to 20% using 80% it would be more like 40% using 60% and what about the biggest leaches of them all, the wealthy? How much you want to bet they got gerrymandered out of the results?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:25PM
>Age 3 is extremely early to be making decisions about who is and isn't going to succeed.
In case of genetic disease, *conception* is when you can make such decisions with very high certainty. What makes you sure the root cause here is not some mild genetic defect?
And even barring that - the brain's ability to rewire itself degrades with age. It might just happen that by that age, certain kinds of defective wiring, acquired in whatever way, become unfixable - either without a dedicated effort, or at all. Nature has no justice and no compassion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:25PM
The 1930's called. They want their eugenics meme back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @07:44AM
If by your doctrine they must be wrong in every thing, then why don't you stop doing either, or both?
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Wernher von Braun is still the father of USA space program. Science is science, and nature forgot to make an exception for your ideology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:03PM
How any sane person can view the wealthy as somehow "deserving" a disproportionate share of society's resources I will never understand. Ok, that's a lie. I understand, millenia of war and struggle resulted in "strong men" to fight wars, and a natural corollary is the pyramid power structure of aristocracy. We've outgrown the need for one person to be "king" and call the shots, in fact we never really needed it in the first place and it has probably caused more problems than it solved. There are a multitude of other community structures that humans have successfully used.
As you said, the wealthy are the biggest leeches, That is the problem we need to solve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @04:48AM
The doctor who saved my life is indeed deserving the large amount of money he's received from both me and the medical system. For better or for worse, money is a great indicator of a person's value to society; even if an unproductive playboy is lucky enough to inherit wealth from a productive father, that that playboy's wealth will either diminish under his lack of productivity, or it will be placed into the control of productive money-making managers, who do make good profitable allocations of resources for the rest of society.
Money is awesome. It is the best indicator of worthiness in society, a role that money takes on best when allowed to exist in a completely Free Market.