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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, 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."