Bell Curve

196 Cognitive Classes and Social Behavior Welfare Dependency 197and whether she was below the poverty line in the year before birth, inaddition to the usual three variables. The dependent variable is whetherthe mother received welfare benefits during the year after the birth ofher first child. As the black line indicates, cognitive ability predicts goingon welfare even after the effects of marital status and poverty havebeen extracted. This finding is worth thinking about, for it is not intuitivelypredictable. Presumably much of the impact of low intelligenceon being on welfare-the failure to look ahead, to consider consequences,or to get an education-is already captured in the fact that thewoman had a baby out of wedlock. Other elements of competence, orlack of it, are captured in the fact that the woman was poor before thebaby was born. Yet holding the effects of age, poverty, marital status,and parental SES constant, a white woman with an IQ at the 2d centilehad a 47 percent chance of going on welfare, compared to the 8 percentchance facing a white woman at the 98th centile.The socioeconomic background of these mothers was not a statisticallysignificant factor in their going on welfare.The Role of EducationWe cannot analyze welfare recipiency among white women with a hachelor'sdegree because it was so rare: Of the 102 white mothers with aR.A. (no more, no less) who met the criteria for the sample, 101 hadnever received any welfare. But we can take a look at the high schoolsample. For them, low cognitive ability was as decisive as for the entirepopulation of NLSY white mothers. The magnitude of the independenteffect of IQ was about the same, and the effect of socioeconomic statuswas again statistically insignificant. The other variables swept away allof the connections between welfare and social class that seem so evi.dent in everyday life.CHRONIC WELFARE DEPENDENCYNow we focus on a subset of women who go on welfare, the chronicwelfare recipients. They constitute a world of their own. In the courseof the furious political and scholarly struggle over welfare during the1980s, two stable and consistent findings emerged, each having differentimplications: Taking all the women who ever go on welfare, the aver-age spell lasts only about two years.7 Rut among never-married mothers(all races) who had their babies in their teens, the average time on welfareis eight or more years, depending on the sample being investigated.'The white women who had met our definition of chronic welfare recipientin the NLSY by the 1990 interview fit this profile to some extent.For example, of the white women who gave birth to an illegitimatebaby hefore they were 19 (that is, they probably got pregnant before theywould normally have graduated from high school) and stayed single, 22percent became chronic welfare recipients by our definition-a highpercentage compared to women at large. On the other hancl, 22 percentIS a long way from 100 percent. Even if we restrict the criteria furtherso that we are talking about single teenage mothers who were below thepoverty line, the probability of hecoming a chronic welfare recipientgoes up only to 28 percent.To get an idea of how restricted the population of chronic welfaremothers is, consider the 152 white women in the NLSY who met ourdefinit~on of a chronic welfare recipient and also had IQ scores. Noneof them was in Cognitive Class I, and only five were even in Class 11.Only five had parents in the top quartile in socioeconomic class. Onelone woman of the 152 was from the top quartile in ahility and from thetop quartile in socioeconomic background. White women with aboveaveragecognitive ability or socioeconomic background rarely becomechron~c welfare recipients.Keeping this tight restriction of range in mlnd, consider what happenswhen we repeat the previous analysis (including the extra variablescontrolling for marital status and poverty at the time of first birth) butthis time comparing mothers who became chronic welfare recipientswith women who never received any welfare.'" According to the figure,when it comes to chronic white welfare mothers, the independent effect of the young woman's socioeconomic hackground is substantial.Whether it becomes more important than IQ as the figure suggests isdoubtful (the corresponding analysis in Appendix 4 says no), but clearlythe role of socioeconomic background is different for all welfare recipientsand chronic ones. We spent much time exploring this shift in therole of socioeconomic background, to try to pin down what was goingon. We will not describe our investigation with its many interesting hyways,instead simply reporting where we came out. The answer turns outto hinge on education.