Santa Prefers Rich Sick Kids

I recently came across a beautiful paper:
Dispel the good or bad myth. I recommend reading the entire paper, but here are its main findings:

It has long been thought that Santa Claus gives gifts to good but not naughty children. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to dispel the myth that Santa visits children based on behavior and suggests that socioeconomic deprivation plays a greater role in determining a visit. This raises important ethical dilemmas, such as whether children should be told and what to do about Santa.

Santa Claus has an incredibly difficult job to make sure that all the beautiful children receive gifts. Undoubtedly deeper socioeconomic factors are at play, however affecting Santa’s abilities to help each child. Whether it’s checking his contract or local Santas working in “hard-to-reach” areas, all we want is for every child to be happy this Christmas.

I noticed the paper was cited
a deleted reddit commentso I went and dug it up:

The contract prohibits Santa from changing the socioeconomic status of any individual. To a large extent, the ability to change the status of particular groups will allow Santa to have too much influence on political decisions. This eventually gets noticed and causes discontent that contradicts the main mission of the North Pole: to save Cheer™. That way he can only give gifts that are suitable for the environment in which the child lives.

Here are some highlights from
the BMJ comments section of the paper:

First, we found the issue of measuring “naughty”: as determined by the average number of school days missed and aggregated criminal activity. Average school days missed as a proxy is not appropriate because this metric does not adequately capture the behavior of children who miss school. In a population with a larger hospital system and more sick children, missed days tend to increase due to illness rather than dizziness. In addition, the authors used the average criminal activity for teenagers aged 10-17 as their proxy for delinquency. However, this age group does not reflect the population of pediatric hospital wards as a whole. The transition from child to adult care usually occurs between 15 and 20 years of age or at the end of formal schooling. …

Second, in a sample of American mall Santas (n=15), each reported their first question to the children was whether they were naughty or nice this year. Therefore, self-reports should not be included in the study, because these famous Santas predominate in children’s self-concept.

To say that Santa Claus delivers presents around the world within a 24 hour period is not entirely true. In the Netherlands, for example, Santa traditionally brings his presents on December 6, in Russia (as “Father Frost”) on January 6, and in Germany on December 24 (Christmas Eve). Santa’s arrival in Germany on Christmas Eve has been well documented since 1835 (1). Given the short time from Christmas Eve to Christmas and given that Santa has two bases in North Germany (2), it is likely that he approaches the UK from the East and not from the North. The authors should reanalyze the flight distances under this aspect.

Santa’s reluctance to fly to the UK may have started at Christmas 1940 ff. when the flying obects coming from across the North Sea were met with an unfriendly welcome. The surprising finding that Santa thus skips socioeconomically vulnerable areas may have created a sense of abandonment in these regions. These regions to a certain extent correspond to the regions that voted for brexit (3). Therefore, the authors should include the brexit voting data in the analysis. Protectionism, however, will increase Santa’s reluctance to reliably come to the UK. So the British government would be wise to invite Santa Claus to the brexit negotiations.

You are sincere, Gunther Weitz

Competing interests: I drink Coca-Cola every now and then.

Children are never ‘naughty’ – sometimes they do bad things for a perfectly good reason, of course, and even for not so good reasons, buy there is always a reason of sorts, and the medical professional should realize that. The short title of the paper goes a little way to dispel the myth, but not very far

I am calling for an emergency extraordinary meeting of the guarantors/directors of the BMJ to review the gross lapse of judgment of the editors of the BMJ in their decision to publish this libelous article and to consider the necessary action to protect themselves from to the legal representatives of Claus & Elfs Limited (incorporated by Magnetic North)