People have long assumed that welfare mothers are concentrated at the low end of the cognitive ability distribution and this belief is confirmed by the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). Over three-quarters of the white women on welfare came from the bottom quartile of IQ, compared to 5 percent from the top quartile. The studies analyzed provide some support for those who argue that a culture of welfare dependency tends to transmit chronic welfare dependency from one generation to the next. But if a culture of welfare dependency is at work, it seems to have influence primarily in women of low intelligence. The reader should keep in mind that this chapter, as have all previous ones, deals only with white women and excludes statistics relating to blacks and Chicanos.
Apart from whether it causes increased illegitimacy, welfare has been a prickly topic in the social-policy debate since the core welfare program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) was created, in the mid-1930s. Initially AFDC was a reasonably popular public policy. After all, few were against a program that provided aid to a widow with small children to raise without the financial support of a husband. The same could be said for women who had been abandoned by their no-good husbands. However, in the 1930s, not many could have imagined that a never married woman with one or more illegitimate children would be eligible for AFDC. Not only did they become eligible, but within a short period of time, unmarried mothers constituted a large and ever expanding proportion of the AFDC case load.
However, as the authors point out, some argued that this was much ado about nothing because the welfare case load was still less than two percent when John F. Kennedy took office in 1965. Then, as with so many other well intended social boondoggles, from 1966 to 1975 the percentage of American families on welfare nearly tripled and, after a modest decline in the early 1980s, continued to increase again during the fourth era of welfare dependency; by 1992,when The Bell Curve was written, more than 14 million Americans were on welfare. Today, over 109 million people, 34.5 percent of the population, are on the dole.
The steep rise in the welfare population obviously cannot be explained by intelligence, which did not plummet in the 1960s and 1970s; rather, more fundamental social forces were responsible for the changes that accrued during that period of time. However, as societal norms change, some people are especially vulnerable to the changes- in this case, to conditions that cause welfare dependency. The studies summarized in this chapter unequivocally show that low intelligence increases a white mother’s risk of ending up on welfare, independent of the other factors that might be expected to explain away the relationship (poverty, single motherhood, low education etc.).
There are several good reasons for assuming that welfare mothers come primarily from the lower distribution of cognitive ability. Women on welfare have less education than those who are not on welfare. In this respect, welfare mothers have reading skills that, on average, are three to five years below grade level. However, even within the population of women who go on welfare, the smarter ones are better able to get off it as the NLSY database shows.
Which White Women Go on Welfare
After the Birth of the First Child
Percentage of Mothers
Who Went on AFDC
Within the First Year
Cognitive Class Percentage of Mothers
Who Became Chronic
Welfare Recipients
1 1 Very Bright <1
4 11 Bright 2
12 111 Average 8
21 1V Dull 17
55 V Very Dull 31
12 Overall Average 9
The statistics speak for themselves. Only a very small percentage of bright or very bright white women go on welfare after giving birth to their first child and fewer than two percent become chronic welfare recipients (stay of welfare for 5 years or longer). The majority of very dull mothers end up on welfare and a third of them become chronic welfare recipients. Although the authors do not make the connection, political social policies that base the size of the monthly welfare stipend to the number of children in the welfare mother’s family, encourages dull mothers to have large numbers of dull offspring. This is a major factor in the dumbing down of the American population. As I state in my book America In Decline we should be paying dull women, irrespective of race, not to have children rather, as is present policy, to have increasing numbers of low IQ offspring.
As with most of the charts in The Bell Curve, the one on page 95 shows the effect of parental SEC status and IQ after accounting statistically for poverty and marital status of the mother. Parental SEC status played a minor role in determining whether a white mother would go on welfare within a year of giving birth of a child; however, IQ was a major determinate of the welfare status of mothers who had given birth to a child in the past year. Almost 50 percent of very dull mothers ended up on welfare within a year while less than 10 percent of those with high IQs became welfare recipients during the same period of time. To summarize, cognitive ability is a major predictor of a mothers going on welfare after giving birth to a child even after the effects of marital status and poverty have been extracted. Now let’s focus for a moment on the problem of chronic welfare dependency.
Chronic welfare recipients constitute a world of their own! Of all women who ever go on welfare the average only stays on welfare for about two years. But among never-married mothers (all races) who give birth during their teens, the average time on welfare is a little over eight years. But, the numbers of such women is small, only 22 percent. Even if we restrict the discussion to mothers in poverty the probability of becoming a chronic welfare recipient is only 28 percent. The fact is that white women with above average intelligence and socioeconomic background rarely become chronic welfare recipients.(note the authors have shifted gears and are now talking again only about white women).
In the last chapter the authors provided statistical data that poor women of low IQ were especially likely to have illegitimate babies. In this chapter they demonstrate that even among women who are poor and unmarried when they have their first baby, the less intelligent are the ones that end up on chronic welfare.
Comment: If there is a weakness to this marvelous book, it is this. To avoid the charge of racism the authors have restricted the data presented in the first two parts of their book to the study of white intellect and its effect on the social problems of our time. However, we do not live in a white world; rather, we live in a world where large segments of the population, soon to be a majority, are black and Latino. As we will learn shortly, these people have average IQs far lower than whose of the white and oriental members of society. To ignore these inherited genetic differences in intellect among the races is misleading and only serves to muddy the waters we are attempting to navigate; most importantly, to ignore the variations in inherited intelligence among the races tends to diminish the problems society faces as its population becomes, on average, less intelligent with each passing generation.
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