Books by Itzkoff, Seymour W.

Itzkoff, Seymour W. The Decline of Intelligence in America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994. ISBN 0-275-95229-0.

This book had the misfortune to come out in the same year as the first edition of The Bell Curve (August 2003), and suffers by comparison. Unlike that deservedly better-known work, Itzkoff presents few statistics to support his claims that dysgenic reproduction is resulting in a decline in intelligence in the U.S. Any assertion of declining intelligence must confront the evidence for the Flynn Effect (see The Rising Curve, July 2004), which seems to indicate IQ scores are rising about 15 points per generation in a long list of countries including the U.S. The author dismisses Flynn's work in a single paragraph as irrelevant to international competition since scores of all major industrialised countries are rising at about the same rate. But if you argue that IQ is a measure of intelligence, as this book does, how can you claim intelligence is falling at the same time IQ scores are rising at a dizzying rate without providing some reason that Flynn's data should be disregarded? There's quite a bit of hand wringing about the social, educational, and industrial prowess of Japan and Germany which sounds rather dated with a decade's hindsight. The second half of the book is a curious collection of policy recommendations, which defy easy classification into a point on the usual political spectrum. Itzkoff advocates economic protectionism, school vouchers, government-led industrial policy, immigration restrictions, abolishing affirmative action, punitive taxation, government incentives for conventional families, curtailment of payments to welfare mothers and possibly mandatory contraception, penalties for companies which export well-paying jobs, and encouragement of inter-racial and -ethnic marriage. I think that if an ADA/MoveOn/NOW liberal were to read this book, their head might explode. Given the political climate in the U.S. and other Western countries, such policies had exactly zero chance of being implemented either when he recommended them in 1994 and no more today.

October 2004