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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: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:46PM (#441692)

    Ah, so you're an idiot with no sense of history. Gotcha.

    However, from the 1970s and onwards Sweden's GDP growth fell behind other industrialised countries and the country's per capita ranking fell from 4th to 14th place in a few decades.[172] From the mid-1990s until today Sweden's economic growth has once again accelerated and has been higher than in most other industrialised countries (including the US) during the last 15 years.[173] A report from the United Nations Development Program predicted that Sweden's rating on the Human Development Index will fall from 0.949 in 2010 to 0.906 in 2030.[174]

    Sweden began slowing the expansion of the welfare state in the 1980s, and even trimming it back, and according to the OECD and McKinsey, Sweden has recently been relatively quick to adopt economic liberalisation policies, such as deregulation, compared to countries such as France.[144][175] The current Swedish government is continuing the trend of moderate rollbacks of previous social reforms.[144][176] Growth has been higher than in many other EU-15 countries. Also since the mid-1980s, Sweden has had the fastest growth in inequality of any developed nation, according to the OECD. This has largely been attributed to the reduction in state benefits and a shift toward the privatisation of public services. According to Barbro Sorman, an activist of the opposition Left Party, "The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Sweden is starting to look like the USA." Nevertheless, it remains far more egalitarian than most nations.

    The story has been the same through Thatcher's England to even Reagan in the US.

    Social programs DO NOT create wealth, and instead of creating more dependents to satisfy your ego, maybe you should look towards actual reforms to help their lot in life than tax the rich.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:52PM (#441696)

    You're looking at things backwards and ignoring evidence. The austerity type folks undermine all social programs because they think as you do, "if only those lazy bums would get a job!". Hating on people in need is dumb. Sure there will always be some who just live off the system, just like there will always be some murderers and corrupt politicians. Thing is, the austerity proponents kill the systems, make them less effective, then point to the results and say the system doesn't work.

    It is the worst kind of logic, and it is malicious. So when you parrot that bullshit expect a lot of anger to come back your way.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:56PM (#441698)

    Constant growth is actually a cancer, its part of why we've lost thousands of species, polluted the earth and water systems we depend on, and changed the climate. Its the corporate greed at work, and is not something to be proud of or to aim for. Sustainable living is the answer for today, maybe once we get our tech set up to live efficiently then we can go back to growth.

    Oh look, right there at the end, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. What a great trade off! NOT

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:35PM (#441730)

      http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/25/us-department-defence-one-worlds-biggest-polluters-259456.html [newsweek.com]

      Somehow the idiots who argue against constant growth never fact government into their equations.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:10PM (#441745)

        False flag after false flag on these topics. No one said the government wasn't part of the problem, and most proponents of social programs think we should be reducing military activity. However, that is a pipe dream until the world stops fucking around with who's got the biggest dick and can fuck over everyone else the most.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:22PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:22PM (#441752)

          Military was just the most obvious, and I have yet to see an apt explanation of how the government will regulate "capitalism" and all the evil of pollution it produces when it can't even regulate itself.

          http://ivn.us/2012/04/18/the-number-one-worst-polluter-on-earth-is-the-u-s-federal-government/ [ivn.us]

          No one said the government wasn't part of the problem

          And yet the implication is that the government will solve the problem if we could only tax the rich more, have an even bigger welfare state, as if the military wasn't one of the largest welfare projects in the world.

          False flag indeed.