Speaker biographies

James R. Flynn is professor emeritus at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and recipient of the university’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Career Research.  As a psychologist, he is best known for the “Flynn effect,” the documentation of massive IQ gains from one generation to another, and he has been profiled in Scientific American and Newsweek.  The American Psychological Association has devoted a symposium and a book to his research.  As a philosopher, his latest book is How To Defend Humane Ideals (University of Nebraska Press, 2000).  Professor Jeremy Waldron of Columbia University described Flynn’s treatment of race and class in the book as “magnificent.”  Professor Flynn has been a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford) and a distinguished visiting speaker at Cornell University.  He studied under Hans Morgenthau and Quincy Wright at the University of Chicago and, on occasion, feels moved to discuss the rationality and morality of U.S. foreign policy.  His current research includes IQ and gender, whether America must accept gross inequality between races and classes, and how to reconcile philosophy, psychology, and law concerning when people are responsible for their actions.  Professor Flynn’s most recent paper on the subject of this seminar is “Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples” 17 Psychological Science 9 (October 2006) (with William T. Dickens).

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar AEI.  He first came to national attention with the publication of Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (Basic Books, 1984).  This was followed by In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (Simon & Schuster, 1988); The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (with Richard J. Herrnstein, Free Press, 1994); What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (Broadway Books, 1997); and Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (HarperCollins, 2003).  His most recent book is In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (AEI Press, 2006).  Mr. Murray is a graduate of Harvard College and earned his Ph.D. in political science from MIT.  He served in the Peace Corps and later worked for USAID in Thailand, and has conducted field research in the Thailand, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.  He worked as a research scientist and then chief scientist for the American Institutes for Research, and was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research before coming to AEI in 1990.  Mr. Murray’s most recent paper on the subject of this seminar is “Changes over time in the black–white difference on mental tests: Evidence from the children of the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,” 34 Intelligence 6 (November-December 2006), pp. 527-540.

Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986.  He previously practiced law and was an economic consultant, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was editor and publisher of Regulation magazine, and served on the White House staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.  A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Law School, Mr. DeMuth has published essays on law, policy, and politics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, Commentary, The American Enterprise, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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