Common sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who want their beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support
And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.
One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:
1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726
Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.
The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.
And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.
Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"
And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.
On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?
But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.
[1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...
That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.
However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.
But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.
That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.
That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.
If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...