Thank you. Couldn't find that product on my own. I kept getting ads for vapor rub when I tried to find it.

... yeah. It doesn't matter how much personal motivation you have if the regime whose territory you live in systemically disenfranchises you and enables mass extraction of surplus value. Improving the livelihoods of people in that territory is usually the primary political argument leading to changes in political rule. "Follow me, and I'll get you better food and housing" is a very compelling argument even if the "how" isn't clear. Typically, new political regimes require a period of proving themselves, so they implement policies directly tied to improving social mobility such as socialized housing and healthcare, public infrastructure like transit and medical resources, and education/skill training/jobs programs.

Edit: the article is about a case study on the Meiji Restoration where an entrenched political establishment was replaced with one that promoted social mobility. Which makes sense. Established political regimes want to perpetuate themselves, which usually means establishing some mechanism of inheritance and protecting that mechanism. Shogunate Japan had what was essentially a caste system, where your occupations and expectations were defined by your familial relations. It offered very little social mobility. The period of transition offered the most social mobility because the opportunity for mobility was the best salary available. After the restoration was complete, mobility shrank again as the established regime needed to protect their "in-group" and its interests. Worth reading the article either way for the case study's specifics, but the headline is a little vague for the content.

Did we really need the fMRI to confirm that racist jurors are... racist?

Edit: the research is actually about determining which parts of the brain are active during different types of decision making, primarily biased or distorted decision making. Sort of asking, "Do we have a racism lobe, and where is it?"

If someone did want to do a study to isolate the effect of previous prosecution on future criminality, you could look at the rate of future criminality among a population of offenders who were not prosecuted, ie people who got away with it. Additionally, we can discuss well established socioeconomic causes of criminality and how past criminal convictions can increase one's likelihood to experience those socioeconomic conditions associated with criminality. There are some situations in which "that argument is pretty reasonable, we don't need to spend a generation on a longitudinal study to establish causation while we continue to ruin people's lives with counter productive punishments" is the correct stance to take. Criminal justice reform for non-violent offenses is one of them, in my opinion.

Beyond that, prosecutors are probably on average pretty average people, so why should we expect them to somehow be masters of character judgment? Surely there are some star prosecutors who are, but those few aren't prosecuting every or even most cases. Most cases don't even get to actual prosecution because people are pressured into plea deals, so to imagine any actual character judgment is at play there is a misunderstanding of how our criminal justice system functions.