James Robert Flynn (28 April 1934 – 11 December 2020) was an American-born New Zealand moral philosopher and intelligence researcher. Originally from Washington, D.C., and educated at the University of Chicago, Flynn emigrated to Dunedin in 1963, where he taught political studies at the University of Otago. He was noted for his publications about the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores throughout the world, which is now referred to as the Flynn effect. In addition to his academic work, he championed social democratic politics throughout his life.
Early life and education James Robert Flynn was born in an Irish-American community in Washington, D.C., on April 28, 1934. His parents were Irish-Americans from Missouri. His father, Joseph, left formal schooling at age 12 to work in a factory and later became a "hard-drinking" journalist and editor. Flynn described his father as a "keen reader" who took pride in completing the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen rather than pencil. Flynn's father read classical works to him at a young age, and Flynn said he was "surrounded by good literature" as a child. Flynn became an avid reader as well; later in life, he wrote a book about world literature, and in a 2010 commencement address, he encouraged graduates to learn by reading "works of great literature". His mother, Mae, was an office worker and homemaker who trained as a teacher. He had a brother, Joseph, who became a non-isothermal kinetics chemist. Raised Roman Catholic, Flynn was a choir boy at Washington, D.C.'s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and attended the Catholic private schools St. Paul's Primary School and St. John's Academy. Flynn renounced his Catholic religion at age 12 after winning a full set of World Book Encyclopedia in a city-wide competition and reading about scientific explanations for the creation of the universe that contradicted his creationist education. He credited his rejection of Catholicism and his parents' racial views for forming his secular, socialist views on racial and social equality. Flynn described himself as an "atheist, a scientific realist, a social democrat". Flynn was a lifelong competitive runner who ran for his high school and college and earned six US running medals over the course of his life. In the 1950s, Flynn earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he originally intended to study pure mathematics or theoretical physics "because they seemed to pose the most difficult problems to solve", but ended up studying moral and political philosophy, a field with more practical applications. An "ardent democratic socialist" and "man of the left" throughout his life, Flynn joined the Socialist Party of America in college and, after graduating, became a civil rights activist. While working on his doctorate in politics and moral philosophy, he was political action co-chairman for the university branch of the NAACP, where he worked on its social housing initiatives. His doctorate dissertation was titled, "Ethics and the Modern Social Scientist." He met his wife, an attorney whose family was active in the Communist Party USA, at a protest against segregation at Glen Echo Park in Maryland. He was 26 years old at the time, and she was 17. His wife said that Flynn "ticked the entire list of qualities I wanted in a husband and which I had written down in my diary at the age of 15": he was tall, smart, funny, held left-wing political views, could stand up to her mother, and had a job with a pension. She proposed to him three times: he declined the first two times due to her young age before accepting the third proposal. They named their eldest son, Oxford University maths professor Victor Flynn, after socialist Eugene Victor Debs. The couple also had a daughter, who became a clinical psychologist.
Early career After earning his doctorate in 1958 at age 24, Flynn taught at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, where he chaired the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organisation in the US South. He was reprimanded by the mayor of Richmond and the university for his anti-segregation activism, and removed as the university's track coach. In 1961, he left Kentucky to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, followed by Lake Forest College in Chicago, from which he was fired for giving a lecture on social medicine, working as a peace activist, and being a member of the Socialist Party. By Flynn's own account, in early 1960s America he was consistently fired for his social democratic politics. Accordingly, in 1963, aged 29, he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and remained active (from afar) in the American civil rights movement. In New Zealand Flynn continued to campaign for left-wing causes, and advised Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk on foreign policy. He was a member of the anti-war Committee on Vietnam and gave lectures against nuclear proliferation. In 1967, he joined the University of Otago in Dunedin as Foundation Professor of Political Studies and head of the university's politics department. In 1973, Flynn published Humanism and Ideology: An Aristotelian View.
IQ research and the Flynn effect
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