10.5% of babies in the US are going to be born prematurely, and they're going to have cognitive flexibility, reading, & verbal skills that are half a standard deviation below average, quantitative skills that are three-quarters of a standard deviation down, and working memory that's more than a third of a standard deviation down.
We can basically isolate & identify a major vector of cognitive inequality from the delivery ward.
Through an odd coincidence, a similar proportion of the population in developed countries also experience Traumatic Brain Injuries.
96% of people with brain injuries have substance use problems.
People with brain injuries are 19x more likely to go to prison. Of US prisoners, some proportion between half and four-fifths have brain injuries.
<https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/03/27/a-huge-share-of-prisoners-have-brain-injuries-they-need-more-help>
<https://www.economist.com/international/2021/03/27/brain-injuries-are-startlingly-common-among-those-who-have-committed-crimes>
Everything we talk about re: policing and anarchy is downstream from the fact that industrial modernity is very good at mashing organs, ESPECIALLY the one organ that does all the motor-sequencing and social regulation.
What do you figure is the overlap between the 10.5% of the population that's born prematurely and the 8.5% of the population that gets TBI? It can't be 0 or 100% .
I ask because there's got to be some portion of the developed-world population (somewhere between a tenth and a fifth) that's going to be set for lifetime of sub-optimal cognition just due to these two factors.
Ahh no big. Cognitive deficits can probably be papered over, right? Cognition is for nerds and shit. I'm sure that the losers of this birth lottery won't live lives that are nastier, more brutish, and shorter than the rest of their cohort.