Criticism
Early in the program, there were concerns about whether this program encouraged unwed motherhood. In the 1960s through 1980s, Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley argued that AFDC and other similar programs tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society (particularly blacks, whom he considered to be genetically inferior to whites), causing a reverse evolution (dysgenic effect), founded on the premises that: there is a correlation between financial success and intelligence; and that intelligence is hereditary. Shockley was influential in bringing recognition to this hypothesis among the public and Congress.
Some advocates complained that the rule had the effect of breaking up marriages and promoting matriarchy (see also single-parent family).
... the AFDC program tended to treat households with a cohabiting male who was not the natural father of the children much more leniently than those with a resident spouse or father of the children. This feature created a clear disincentive for marriage and also a clear incentive for divorce, because women who married face the reduction or loss of their AFDC benefits.Lucy A. Williams and Jean Hardisty point to the existence of policies reacting to this perceived problem in some states such as "man-in-the-house" rule:
States had wide discretion to determine eligibility and many states conditioned the receipt of welfare on the sexual morality of the mother, using "suitable home" and "man in the house" rules to disqualify many African American single mothers. The Right's Campaign Against WelfareThe "man-in-the-house" rule was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1968 (see King v. Smith).
In 1984, libertarian author Charles Murray suggested that welfare causes dependency. He argued that as welfare benefits increased, the number of recipients also increased; this behavior, he said, was rational: there is little reason to work if one can receive benefits for a long period of time without having to work. His later work and that of Richard J. Herrnstein and others suggested possible merit to the theory of a dysgenic effect, however, the data are not entirely clear. Right or wrong, this argument was among the stepping stones leading to the modification of AFDC toward TANF.
Read more about this topic: Aid To Families With Dependent Children
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)