Closing the Black/White IQ Gap?

Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine:

On November 28 the American Enterprise Institute held a symposium on the persistent gap between the average IQ test scores of black and non-Hispanic white Americans. The question: Is the gap closing? The presenters at AEI were James Flynn, a philosopher who taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Charles Murray, a scholar at AEI and the co-author of The Bell Curve.

Flynn is famous for having discovered in the 1980s that average IQs in many countries have been drifting upward at about 3 points per decade over the past couple of generations. In fact, the average has risen by an astonishing 15 points in the last 50 years in the United States. In other words, a person with an average IQ of 100 today would score 115 on a 1950s IQ test.

Flynn believes that the data show that the black/white gap is closing—that the average IQ scores of black Americans are rising faster than those of whites. And he began his talk at AEI by describing a study done by a German psychometrician who tested the IQs of 170 white and 69 half-black children left behind in Germany by American GIs. The average score for the white kids was 97 and 96.5 for the half-black kids. Flynn pointed out that the black German kids would probably have had a harder time in German society, yet they scored almost identically to their white counterparts. If the Eyferth study is right, the differences in IQ cannot be attributed to genetics.

More here.