Genetic research disrupts racist views of welfare

Following on my post from yesterday, I've been thinking about how the widespread and often racist views of "welfare" in the United States — especially among poor whites — fester on top of the educated-progressive party line that heritable IQ differences are bunk.

An interesting wrinkle from the study I cited yesterday (Papageorge and Thom 2018) is that the genetics-earnings link is conditioned by family SES. In other words, children with strong genetic endowments for abstract intelligence will not reach their full earnings potential if they are hampered by a poor family environment.

This is consistent with the left-hereditarian position that the normalization and de-stigmatization of IQ differences and IQ testing would, on net, help poor and stereotyped minorities the most. There are highly gifted children in poor and/or minority communities who are not meeting their potential, and we should do everything we can to support them, including the use of IQ tests to fast-track their selection into new opportunities. One could also argue on this basis that redistributive support for such communities is more necessary and/or more "deserved." I'm not personally interested in gradations of desert as a framing for the ethical necessity of egalitarian arrangements, but others might be.

Some of the anti-welfare and anti-black political sentiment of whites is based on the belief that poor black communities should be written off as hopeless in general. This impression is at least partially due to the fact that a lot of government redistribution over the past few decades has been based on truly naïve and false blank-slate ideology, so people now infer that no amount of redistribution could possibly help poor black communities, if it hasn't yet. They come to think we should stop "throwing good money after bad," when they might well be open to throwing good, smarter money after all the bad, dumb money of past efforts. Understanding the reality of how genetic endowments affect economic outcomes, and how those endowments are distributed, promises more than one way to shake up the whole reactionary, conventional framing of welfare politics in general.