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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: 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].