Talk:Aid to Families with Dependent Children

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Contents 1 Pros and cons section 2 Edited for grammar and POV 3 Criticisms 4 POV edit 1/30/07 5 Suggested to be referenced or removed

[edit] Pros and cons section

Why is there a pros and cons section with such heavy bias and opinion? This section should be removed.

All the highly partisan parts beginning with "Welfare reform is no longer controversial..." should be axed or seriously edited. Just because TNR says it don't make it so. Also other errors: "culture of poverty" is a highly controversial set of THEORIES put forward by conservative social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, then adopted by Reagan-era conservatives. Also e.g., misleading to say someone could get benefits for "his whole life": since recipients had to be single parents of young children, no "lifetime" benefits were in the offing, and virtually all these single parents were women. It is OK to include partisan perspectives about welfare, but to simply quote the most conservative interpretation of the programs as if it were true and there were no debate is teribly misleading.

If any editor has a reliable source that gives a different interpretation, it sould be provided so users can see the debate. Rjensen 19:41, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the person who complained about the pov. I've added a pov tag. I've also added a cleanup tag, since so much of the article is ungrammatical.--24.52.254.62 00:07, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Edited for grammar and POV

Attempted to remove POV issues. Changed heading "pros & Cons" to "Critisisms"

Identified New Republic as a conservative periodical and suggested subjectivity in their assessment

[edit] Criticisms

Well, for starters, we need sources for those criticisms. Who said it was "relatively lax", etc.

Next, I've removed this: "It has been suggested that this had a dysgenic effect on the US population." Like the rest of the section, it's unsourced. However, it is also a meta-meta-criticism. The claim is as follows: 1) AFDC recipients were genetically inferior to the rest of the population 2) AFDC encouraged more births. 3) (conclusion) AFDC had a dysgenic effect.

For this claim, we need sources for each of these. Since their are no sources given for the foundation (1 & 2), claim #3 is a castle in the sky. Mdbrownmsw 16:37, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I added a source for claim 3, which probably backs 1 & 2.--Zero g 17:42, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The source does not say AFDC had a dysgenic effect. The ONLY mention of AFDC is that unwanted births was a cause of dependance on AFDC. Before this turns into a full on edit war, I will throw a ^{[citation needed]} tag on it for now, refer you to WP:OR and give it a few days to find a source. Mdbrownmsw 04:54, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The title of the article is 'Unwanted Births And Dysgenic Reproduction In The United States'. So the mention of AFDC falls under the general scope of the article. The particular section also mentions that this prevention (in theory) would have eugenic benefits, and dysgenic (in practice) is commonly used as the reverse of eugenic. Besides, you can't expect authors to use "dysgenic" in every paragraph just in case some people might be arguing about the exact interpretation of a rather obvious article one day. So I'd say the source does implicate that AFDC is considered to have a dysgenic effect. --Zero g 09:32, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

The article does not say AFDC had a dysgenic effect. It said unwanted births caused dependance on AFDC. You are crafting a new interpretation of the material in the article.

First, you are reversing the statement in the article to say that unwanted births were caused by AFDC (this qualifies as original research (and it's a logical falicy to boot)). Next you extend this to say that all unwanted births are disgenic (not stated in the article). Then you string them together (which is original research) as follows AFDC causes unwanted births + all unwanted births are dysgenic : AFDC had a dysgenic effect.

To cap this all off, before my edit, it said that this has been "suggested". The only place it was "suggested" was the wikipedia article. Mdbrownmsw 17:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

My mistake, the article in question indeed doesn't make any kind of claim to go on. There's some evidence that unwanted births are related to a dysgenic decline in intelligence, but that falls outside the scope of this article.

While at it, the following reference might be of interest:

Bogue, D.J., 1975, Longterm solution to AFDC problem- prevention of unwanted pregnancy, Social Science Review 49(4): 539-552 --Zero g 17:55, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Still no reliable source for the dysgenic claim. Mdbrownmsw 19:39, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV edit 1/30/07

I just removed this:

"Evidence for this claim can be found in the work of Charles Murray, who suggested that welfare causes dependency. He argued that as welfare benefits increased, the number of recipients also increased; this behavior, he said, was totally rational, because why work if one can receive benefits for a long period of time without having to? While this ideology drove policy, the data, is not entirely clear. States with the most generous welfare policies have the fewest recipients and vice versa. For instance, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama have relatively restricted welfare policies; these states have higher rates of welfare recipients than Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other states with more liberal welfare policies. However, welfare policy is only part of these liberal states' diverse social programs, and the southern states face very different demographics and economic challenges.

In the 1960s through 1980s William Shockley argued with some support that AFDC and other similar programs tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society, causing a reverse evolution (dysgenic effect), founded on the premises that: (A) there is a correlation between financial success and intelligence, and (B) that intelligence is hereditary. Shockley, whose initial fame came from his electronics designs, was abrasive and not a credible spokesman; however, he and others were influential in bringing recognition to their hypothesis among the public and Congress. The later work of Charles Murray, Richard J. Herrnstein, and others suggested possible merit to the theory of a dysgenic effect, however, without definitive proof. In the end, this argument, right or wrong, was among the stepping stones leading to the modification of AFDC toward TANF.

Part of the reason that welfare reform became so popular was because of changing views and demographics of welfare and poverty. In 1935, when the legislation was first enacted, the dominant view was that women should stay home for the benefit of their children; by the late 20th century (and probably due to the Women's Rights Movement of the 1970s), staying home with children was seen as a privilege and most mothers should have the obligation to work. Furthermore, in 1935, most of the single-mother beneficiaries of welfare were widows; by 1988, most of these women with children were either unmarried or divorced."

Names of writers or "the work of..." are not sources. This section makes numerous specific claims that need sources. Mdbrownmsw 19:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Am replacing the text removed without forming a concensus --Kevin Murray 07:27, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I've provided footnotes for the text that I added a while back. Some of the other text that I returned today was from other editors and I would be inclined to remove with agreement, especially the discussion about the various state's experiences, which seems intuitive, but I have no idea where that info came from. The site referenced in note 1 seems to have a grerat deal of information which could be added here --Kevin Murray 08:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggested to be referenced or removed

"States with the most generous welfare policies have the fewest recipients and vice versa. For instance, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama have relatively restricted welfare policies; these states have higher rates of welfare recipients than Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other states with more liberal welfare policies. However, welfare policy is only part of these liberal states' diverse social programs, and the southern states face very different demographics and economic challenges." --Kevin Murray 09:25, 6 February 2007 (UTC)