This commentary is by Lee Russ of Bennington, a retired legal editor who was the lead editor/author of both the third edition of “Couch on Insurance” and the Attorneys Medical Advisor.
As any conservative will tell you repeatedly, poor decision-making is the real root cause of poverty.
Since where you live, which schools you attend, and parental wealth and education are the most significant factors that determine a person’s lifetime income and general economic status, the responsibility of individuals must begin before birth.
Obviously people who inherit vast fortunes, and those who grow up in homes where money and education are both valued and easily available, deserve their prosperity, since they made astute pre-birth decisions. In short, they have vastly superior talents as parent selectors.
The poor, who lacked these parental selection skills, need to accept the consequences of their poor decision-making in the crucial period before they were conceived and while they were in utero.
That doesn’t mean that those of us who enjoy the fruits of good pre-birth judgment can’t lend the poor a hand. To that end, the scientific community has begun careful study of what it is calling “Pre-Birth Judgment” or PBJ. Those who make poor PBJs are considered to suffer from “Pre-Birth Misjudgment Syndrome” or PBMS.
Funded by several billionaires who wish to remain anonymous, the Crazy Yet Lucrative Uses of Reason Project (CYLURP) has partnered with the National Society of Erroneous Economists (NatSEE) and the National Association of Deluded Psychologists and Psychiatrists (NAD-PAP) to formulate a set of diagnostic criteria that will allow PBMS to be added to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the bible for diagnosing mental disorder.
To date, the project has identified the following criteria for diagnosing PBMS:
- Lack of economic resources
- Major periods of anxiety over lack of resources
- Bouts of anger that often cause sleep difficulties and occasionally produce angry outbursts
- Poor health, especially hypertension, obesity, cirrhosis
- Depressive mood marked by prolonged bouts of hopelessness.
The long-term prognosis for some 95% of PBMS sufferers can be stated simply as “SCREWED.”
The project has a way to go, yet, but is making progress. Researchers are already on the verge of establishing that their working hypothesis can’t be definitively disproved. Several other projects are already underway.
Lead researcher Pietr Piper-Picking last month announced a long-term study that will compare PBMS sufferers to those who have demonstrated superior PBJ skills. The study hopes to elucidate whether good PBJ of offspring can be predicted by the pre-birth judgment of parents.
“We suspect,” Piper-Picking said in a prepared statement, “that there will be a significant genetic component to PBJ. If so, I fear there is little that can be done to improve the pre-birth judgment of those who choose parents of limited resources and education.”
