Since IQ scores go up about 3 points per decade, another way to interpret the results is that blacks are about one decade behind whites in the US.

And it also means that older people must have lower IQs. A sixty-year old must on average score 12 IQ points below a twenty-year old. Heck, how old is Saletan again?

If IQ scores go up about 3 points per decade, is the gap between whites and black closing? Are you saying that only the black IQ rises but the white, East Asian, and Ashkenazi Jewish IQ stand still? In its age cohort, is an average black person smarter in comparison to his peers of other ethnic groups than he used to be a decade ago?

endorendil:

IQ scores go up about 3 points per decade,

I've heard this statistic before, and never understood it. Since IQ scores are normalized to have a constant mean of 100, how can they go up or down?

you could compare scores before normalization - assuming you have some reason for believing the tests are equivalent.

freepeoplearenotequal, it seems the IQ scores are going up in most populations, and the gaps may be getting smaller.

Rick, IQ scores are normalized once to a reference population, then used on other populations, or the same population at a later time, without needing to be normalized again. It was found that the scoring needed to be renormalized regularly because the average kept creeping up. Essentially, what that shows is that IQ scores don't measure an innate quality of human beings. As humans become more accustomed to regular testing, and the kinds of things that are being tested, we get better at it - as a whole. Also our educational system is geared more to improving test scores than it used to be.