The Bell Curve Part 11 Chapter 8- Family Matters

Rumors of the death of the traditional American family have much truth in them for those with low cognitive ability and little education and much less truth for very bright educated Americans. For marriage the general rule is that the more intelligent are more likely to get married that the less intelligent. The relationship of intelligence to marriage is somewhat obscured among those with high levels of education because college and graduate school are powerful delayers of marriage. Divorce has long been more prevalent in the lower socioeconomic and educational brackets, but this is better explained by cognitive level than by social status. Actually, once the marriage-breaking impact of low intelligence is taken into account, people of higher SES are more likely to get divorced than people of low status. Illegitimacy, one of the central social problems of our time, is strongly related to intelligence. White women in the bottom 5 percent of IQ are six times as likely to have an illegitimate first child than those in the top 5 percent. Low cognitive ability is a much stronger predisposing factor for illegitimacy than socioeconomic background. Almost no highly educated white women are having illegitimate children, whatever their family background or intelligence. The happily married couple where the husband works and the wife stays home and raises the children is a thing of the distant past. Today a large proportions of young people are staying single; half of marriages end in divorce; and out of wedlock births are soaring. So what else in new, you might be asking? In the media and academic circles these features of the modern family are discussed as if they were spread more or less evenly across all levels of society; but they are not and this is what this chapter entitled family matters is all about. Let's start with marriage. The marriage rate increased drastically after world war 11, as one would expect, to 120 marriages for every 1,000 women. Since the post war marriage boom there has been a slow but steady decline in the propensity to marry and by 1990 only 50 of every 1000 women were getting married each year. (the marriage rate has continued to fall and hit a low of 31 per 1000 women in 2012). Still the institution of marriage remains alive and well, over 90 percent of Americans have married by the time they reach their 40s. What does cognitive ability have to do with marriage? In pre-modern societies the wealthy and successful married at younger ages than the poor and underprivileged. Today the opposite is true, economically successful educated people are less likely to marry than their less educated and unsuccessful counterparts. In studies incorporating IQ, age and socioeconomic status, IQ has no significant independent role although there is a slight statistically significant decrease in the marriage rate as IQ goes up. Socioeconomic background has a larger suppressive role on marriage. The richer and better educated your parents, the less likely you are to get married. The primary culprit in the falling marriage rate is education, or the lack of a college education. IQ plays little or no role as a determinate of whether college graduates marry or remain single; however, there is a huge difference in the marriage rates of low IQ and high IQ high school graduates. Only 60 percent of those with low IQ in the high school sample are likely to marry while over 90 percent of those with very high intellect are likely to do so. Strictly considering IQ and the chances of being married by age 30, the NLSY data reveals that young people are more likely to be married, 81 percent, if they have average IQs. The very bright and the very dull are less likely to get married, 67 percent and 72 percent respectively. This finding is the result of the fact that educated white women are delaying marriage, or avoiding marriage entirely while the very dull are having difficulty finding anyone who will marry them. OK, people marry, but do they stay married? The changes in the divorce rate have been nothing short of catastrophic over the past half century. In 1920 only 8 out 1000 married females experienced divorce. The divorce rate changed little until the 1960s but then began to sky-rocket. By 1970 there was a 50 percent chance of every marriage ending in divorce! There are many reasons for the high divorce rate in this country including, most importantly, changing laws that made it easier to divorce. The authors of The Bell Curve addressed the narrow question: How does divorce currently (1990s) correlate with intelligence. The National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) showed that very bright people were ten times as likely to stay married for at least five years as to get a divorce. In people with average or below average intelligence the chances of divorce doubled and did not vary significantly between those who had average IQs and those were dull or very dull. The NLSY study also showed that the divorce rate increased as parental SES went from low to high, if your parents were wealthy you were more likely to be divorced. The study also showed that higher education is associated with lower levels of divorce. In this respect, the divorce rate in college graduates was half that of students with only a high school diploma. But IQ still played a significant role in the divorce rate of college students. The divorce rate of college students with average IQs of 100 was 28 percent while it was only 9 percent in those with IQs of 130. Illegitimacy touches on one of the most sensitive topics in the study of intelligence and its possible social consequences: fertility patterns of the smart and the dumb have long term effects on the collective IQ of our nation. The seriousness of this problem is revealed by the fact that in the seventy-one years between

1920 and 1990 the proportion of children born to single white women went from less than three percent, where it had been historically throughout American history, to a staggering 30 percent. (As in previous chapters, the authors exclude blacks and Hispanics from consideration in their analysis of illegitimacy. In 2012, the illegitimacy rates among blacks and Hispanics was 72.3 percent and 53.3 percent respectively.) Returning to the narrative in The Bell Curve, in 1960 there were just 73,000 never married mothers; by 1980 there were 1.0 million; and by 1990 the number had increased to 2.9 million. The numbers of never married mothers increased 40 fold from 1960 to 1990. "What's difference does it make?" Hillary Clinton is probably asking. Well, it makes a world of difference when it comes to the intellectual well-being of the country because, smart white women are having fewer smart children while dull black and Hispanic women are turning out dull children by the truck load every day of the year. Here are the facts concerning illegitimacy and intellect (my conjecture, not the authors). IQ, in itself, has not changed enough in recent years to explain the explosive rate in illegitimacy in the welfare state, flawed public policy is primarily responsible for that. However, welfare policies, such as food stamps and monthly welfare stipends for unwed mothers interact with intelligence making it more likely that a women of low cognitive ability will have babies out of wedlock just to increase the size of her welfare check. Here is the supposition. The less intelligent a women is, the less likely it is that she will associate sex with procreation; will remember to use birth control; and consider when and under what circumstances she should have a child. But just how big is the problem of illegitimacy in women who are cognitively challenged? The following table provides the answer. The Incidence of Illegitimacy Among Young White Women Cognitive Class Percentage Who Have Given Berth to an Illegitimate Child 1 Very Bright 2 11 Very Bright 4 11 Normal 8 1V Dull 17 V Very Dull 32 Overall average 8 Now, what proportion of first babies born to white women are illegitimate? The Proportion of White First Births That Are Illegitimate Cognitive Class Percentage of Illegitimate Births 1 Very Bright 7 11Bright 7 111 normal 14 1V Dull 23 V Very Dull 42 Overall Average 14 In the very dull, 53 percent of first births were conceived before marriage while only 11 percent of women who were very bright conceived a child before they were married. The differences between the cognitive classes are huge, almost as if they lived in different worlds and indeed they do. In times long past, the view of illegitimacy was that it occurred mostly in among girls from the lower classes, with occasional and scandalous "slip-ups" by higher class "good girls" who messed up and "got in trouble." But today births out of wedlock are occurring at all levels of our sexually liberated society, especially in women who are not very bright. In this respect, white women with less than a high school education are 20 times more likely to have an illegitimate child than are those with at least a college degree. Socioeconomic status plays a smaller role in illegitimacy. In women with average intelligence, the illegitimacy rate was 19 percent in women from low SES families and 8 percent in those who had been came from a very high status family. But the odds of having an illegitimate first child drop from 34 percent for very dull women to 4 percent for very smart women, a swing of 30 percentage points independent of any effect of socioeconomic status. The number of "Murphy Browns", well educated women who choose to have a baby out of wedlock, is increasing. The percentage of women with bachelor's degrees who decided to have an illegitimate child increased from 3 to 6 percent from 1982 to 1992. But during the same decade the percentage of never-married women with less than a high school degree who had an illegitimate child increased from 35 to 49 percent. In the end it all comes back to IQ. A high school graduate with IQ of 70 has a 34 percent chance that her first child will be born out of wedlock while a graduate with an IQ of 130 has less than a 3 percent chance of having an illegitimate first child, based on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. What about the role of poverty and welfare in out of wedlock births? In the poorest communities, having a baby out of wedlock is no longer fronded upon because a single woman, thanks to welfare, can support a child without the help of a husband. Today, for poor women, the welfare system eases, or eliminates entirely, the economic penalties that before the 1960s might have restrained their childbearing. Today, the poorer a woman is the more attractive the welfare package and the more likely it is that she will have one or more illegitimate children as a way out of poverty. In this respect, the NLSY showed that 44 percent of the babies born to white mothers who were impoverished were illegitimate while only 6 percent of those above the poverty line had babies out of wedlock. However, these figures are misleading because the vast majority of impoverished women who had illegitimate children also had very low IQs while the numbers of out of wedlock births was extremely low on intelligent women whether they were impoverished or not. Thus, low intelligence is an important independent cause of illegitimacy irrespective of the role poverty may play in the equation. Many liberals have argued that the welfare system cannot be the cause of illegitimacy because welfare, as presently structure is a bad deal, providing only enough to squeak by on. The welfare mothers, they argue, would be much better off completing their education and getting a job than they would living on welfare. The authors of The Bell Curve agree to a point, but point out that it takes foresight and intelligence to make this distinction, something that is woefully lacking in women of low intellect. When all factors are considered, cognitive ability, in itself' is an important factor in illegitimacy, possibly the most important factor. Policy makers must understand the strong link between maternal IQ and out of wedlock births if they are to have any chance of reducing the alarming rate of illegitimacy in our country. Comment: This chapter on Family Matters can be summed up in one short sentence. Low cognitive ability is a primary cause of all of our social problems in twenty-first century America. Until our political leaders recognize this fact, and learn to deal with it, nothing will change.