Passive voice: "Something should be done about this."
Active voice: "Give me a badge and a gun, and I will do it."
A GaryNorth.com site member spotted this article.
A simple test at the age of three can determine whether children will grow up to be a burden on society, needing excessive welfare, ending up in jail or becoming obese.Scientists at King's College London followed more than 1,000 children from before school until they were 38, to find out if it was possible to predict who would go on to lead troubled lives.
All were given a 45 minute test aged three to gauge intelligence, language and motor skills, and were also assessed about their levels of tolerance, restlessness, impulsivity and social disadvantage.
After 35 years, the researchers found one fifth of the group was responsible for 81 per cent of the criminal convictions; three quarters of drug prescriptions; two thirds of welfare benefit payments and more than half of nights in hospital.
This is a standard 20/80 Pareto distribution. Nothing new here.
Then the article gets more interesting.
But crucially, they discovered that the outcome could have been predicted decades earlier, simply by looking at which children attained the lowest test scores aged three.The team believe that if all children could be tested it would be possible to work out who were at greatest risk, so that interventions could be made to prevent them slipping into a life where they were a burden on the state.
Always be alert to the passive voice when reading articles on how things can be fixed. Ask yourself these questions:
Fixed by whom?
How?
At what cost?
With what effects on liberty?
We read: "The team believe that if all children could be tested." I'll bet the team has specific testers in mind, people just like the team members. Caring people. People who have the best interests of the state in mind.
"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.
I see. Testing would be a cost-cutting measure for the state. It would not lead to reduced taxation, I predict. It would lead to more money to test even more children.
"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."
Ah, yes: compassion. Shown by compassionate employees of the compassionate state.
The team began the project to test the 'Pareto principle' - also known as the '80-20 rule' - which states that in the majority of systems, around 80 per cent of the effects come from about 20 per cent of the causes.This principle has been found to work computer science, biology, physics, economics and many other fields.
So far, so good.
Then the hard sell:
The new research found that the law is also true for societal burden. As well as increased criminality and NHS use, the most costly participants of the study also carried 40 per cent of the obese weight and filed 36 per cent of personal-injury insurance claims."Most expenses from social problems are concentrated in a small segment of the population," said co-author Prof Avshalom Caspi, of King's College and Duke University.
"So whatever segment of the health, social or judicial system that you look at, we find a concentration. That concentration approximates what Pareto anticipated over 100 years ago.
I have more questions:
Who will do the testing?
Who will pay for the testing?
Will the testing be voluntary?
If testing will help the state cut costs, will the state require testing?
It is scientific, you see:
"And we can predict this quite well, beginning at age three by assessing a child's history of disadvantage, and particularly their brain health. There is a really powerful connection from children's early beginnings to where they end up."
Another expert returns to the passive voice.
Rena Subotnik, director of the Centre for Psychology in Schools and Education for the American Psychological Association, said that if problem children could be targeted early society could benefit hugely in the long term."You get the best bang for the buck with early intervention," she said. "These are all traits that can be controlled and improved upon, so identifying them in young children is a gift, and all of society would benefit.
More bang from whose buck?
Prof Moffitt added: "This study really gives a pretty clear picture of what happens if you don't intervene."
Who is "you"? Does "you" really mean "we"? Who are "we"?
The team is now hoping to study the one third of people in the group who seemed to never use public services, but simply paid in tax."I think they are really interesting people," added Prof Moffitt. "They make up the support ratio. They haven't been to the hospital, they haven't been before the criminal court.
"We have this silver tsunami of disabled baby boomers and these are the young people who are going to be footing the bill."
Promise the "good" voters tax cuts. That will lure them in.
We are back to what C. S. Lewis warned about in 1949 in his essay, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."
The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the 'cure' of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind or the Humanitarian. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And or course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community's moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts--and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature--who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?
Ken Kesey wrote a novel about this: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But, as we have seen, these experts are ready to start administering behavioral modifications on three-year-old children.
My advice: never let the experts get away with using the passive voice. Have them spell it out:
Which behavior modifications?
Applied by whom?
For how long?
At whose expense?
Using which guidelines?
Tested by whom?
At whose expense?
With what sanctions for compliance?
Funded by whom?
There is something else that the article did not mention: the gender of the deviants. Were they mostly male? Of course. Did the experts discuss this? Of course not.
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails,
That's what little boys are made of.What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all things nice,
That's what little girls are made of.
We know where this is heading: the nanny state. It will be run by little old ladies of both sexes and all ages.
Compulsory testing: it's coming to state-licensed day cares near you if the experts have anything to say about it . . . and get the funding. It's coming to tax-funded kindergartens for everyone else.
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