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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 15 2016, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:09PM (#441648)
    • 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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:20PM

    by Wootery (2341) on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:20PM (#442718)

    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.