Employment-resistant personalities

From The Spectator in the UK

Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology.

Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to be passed down from one generation to the next.

Perkins published his findings last November in a book called The Welfare Trait (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99), but you won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians..

Colleagues with whom Perkins had collaborated in the past warned him off publication, worried about being associated with such a heretic...

You have to love it.  "Employment-resistant personality".  

One question that needs to be examined is the degree to which welfare attracts people with those characteristics and the degree to which welfare creates those personality clusters in otherwise employable people.

It is interesting the degree of energy Dr Perkins' research generated, even to the degree of the establishment black-balling anybody who assists Dr Perkins with peer reviewed research.  Heck, it is not like he is giving nuclear weapons to unstable, terrorist nations.