October 2006

Megan McArdle “tells us”:http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009521.html that the _Economist_ has moved all of its material from behind the paywall (if you’re not a subscriber, you need to watch an ad to get in). It seems to me that this is good news for the _Economist_; I can’t imagine it’ll lose many subscribers, and it may gain some. It’s also good news for people like meself who like to take potshots at its odder articles; we can now be sure that our readers can actually read the original if they click on the link. This “piece”:http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8058337 on the demise of Mark Warner’s and George Felix Allen’s respective president hopes is a case in point. Most of the article is pretty unexceptionable. The peculiar bit is this summation of the current state of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But whatever the reason, [Warner’s] retreat has created a vacuum. He had positioned himself as the centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the darling of the party’s liberal activists. Southerners, Westerners and moderates are now shopping for a new candidate, perhaps Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico or Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the vice-presidential nominee in 2004.

So Hillary Clinton is apparently the “darling of the party’s liberal activists.” Now, we don’t have any really decisive evidence on this – the only surveys that I know of which try to figure out what “liberal activists” want are the “Pew survey”:http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/240topline.pdf (which focuses on Howard Dean supporters) and the “Blogpac survey”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/6/15/125046/110, which draws from a sample of MoveOn email list subscribers. Neither is definitive – but Pew finds that Clinton polls number 4 or number 3 among former Dean activists depending on which question you look at, while the Blogpac survey finds her to be joint fifth with Joe Biden, and to have higher unfavourable ratings than any other listed candidate. Given that Clinton has specifically tried to position herself _as_ the centrist alternative over the last couple of years, this is about what one would expect. Equally bizarre is the suggestion that centrists might want to gravitate towards John Edwards. This could just be the result of sloppy thinking that telescopes “Southerners, Westerners and moderates” into a unified category, but to the extent that Edwards might appeal to Southerners and Westerners, it’s not because he’s a moderate. It’s because he’s running the most economically populist campaign that a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination has run in recent history. These claims don’t seem biased to me so much as clueless. The bit about Clinton in particular strikes me as the sort of thing one might believe if one listened more to Republicans talking about Democrats than to Democrats themselves. I don’t get the impression that the article’s author actually knows very much about what’s happening within the Democratic party. Not what you expect from a serious magazine.

Earlier this year, Brad DeLong suggested that he should get rich and then give a large grant to me to do a study. I’m all for Brad getting rich and I happily await the day including the check he’ll send my way as a result. However, in the meantime, it’s good to know that there are some other sources of potential funding for work on information technologies.

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new initiative in Digital Media and Learning. They have committed $50 million dollars over five years to this. I was fortunate to be one of the recipients of a research grant. My project will be a look at young people’s uses of the Internet with particular focus on their skills and participation. I will also be conducting a training intervention (on participants randomly assigned to the control versus the experimental group) to see if we can create a program that helps people improve their online abilities (in such domains as efficiency in content navigation and evaluating the credibility of information).

Generally speaking, the goal of this initiative is to gain a better understanding of how young people are using digital media in their everyday lives and how various types of learning are taking place outside of the classroom through the use of such media. MacArthur has also launched a blog to discuss related projects.

The press conference was simulcast in Second Life and some participants captured a few screenshots, including ones from Teen Second Life.

As you can imagine, I’m super excited about all this and so will likely be blogging about related issues in the future (hah, not that I haven’t already).

I doubt very much that I’m the only person in the CT community who has found themselves for some reason unbeknownst to them signed up to the Comnet Communitarian Letter (which I find to be rather trite and platitudinous; but then, I’m not a communitarian nor do I ever want to be). Nor am I the only person who’s found that it’s impossible to get off the mailing list; I know this for a fact as one of my mates was bitching about this very problem to me the other day. There’s an email address at the bottom of the Letter that you’re supposed to write to if you want to get off the listserv, but the way that they’ve configured their software, the only result you get is an error message . This is not an acceptable way to configure an email list that you then sign people up to without their permission. I believe that communitarians are big into collective shaming mechanisms, where you call people out for bad behavior in front of the community, so that they will mend their ways and do better in future. Here goes.

Blog: Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark has set up a new group blog-journal, “Qahwa Sada”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/qahwa_sada/.

Why a new blog-journal by Middle East experts? Because Middle East studies specialists have a phenomenal amount of quality knowledge about the Arab and Islamic world… Many are out there in the region, seeing things happen and talking to people over a sustained period of time. But they often have trouble getting that knowledge out into the public realm. Part of the problem is that there just aren’t nearly enough of the right kind of outlets. Academic journals are not well suited to getting information and analysis out to a wide public, and many have yet to adapt to the internet era. Blogs are wonderful, but not everyone wants one or has the time to run one. … That means that debate is too often dominated by people with, shall we say, a less empirically rich or theoretically sophisticated understanding of the region. Qahwa Sada aims to fix this market failure by providing a public forum for Middle East studies specialists to talk about what they know.

Manifesto: Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have written a forthright (and in my view, excellent) “manifesto”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12124 for liberalism in the US, as a response to Tony Judt’s accusation that US liberals have been supine in the face of the conservative onslaught over the last several years. Those who aren’t allergic to signing these things on principle should seriously consider signing it – it isn’t the usual pablum. A lot of people whom I respect have signed up already (Yochai Benkler, Josh Cohen, Robert Dahl, Margaret Levi and Charles Tilly to name a few).

“A new Bravia Ad”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/paint/thead/. No, not the bouncy balls one. A new one. Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com.

“Following up on yesterday’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/18/floating-the-fraud-balloon/, David Kane’s unfounded accusations have been removed from the front page of the “Social Science Statistics”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/ blog. SSS blogger Amy Perfors “apologises for the error of judgment”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/removed_a_case.shtml and says they removed the post because the “tone is unacceptable, the facts are shoddy, and the ideas are not endorsed by myself, the other authors on the sidebar, or the Harvard IQSS.” Good for them. IQSS Director “Gary King”:http://gking.harvard.edu also “comments briefly”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/the_probability.shtml on the matter.

I’m using a blog to beg for help on a minor point.

The Wikipedia article on pscyhological egoism, which draws on the e Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, includes

Finally, psychological egoism has also been accused of using [[circular logic]]: “If a person willingly performs an act, that means he derives personal enjoyment from it; therefore, people only perform acts that give them personal enjoyment”. In particular, seemingly altruistic acts must be performed because people derive enjoyment from them, and are therefore, in reality, egoistic.. This statement is circular because its conclusion is identical to its hypothesis (it assumes that people only perform acts that give them personal enjoyment, and concludes that people only perform acts that give them personal enjoyment).

I’ve added the claim, based on memory that “This objection was made by William Hazlitt* in the 19th century, and has been restated many times since then”, but Google only produces reference to a previous occasion on which I made the same claim. Can anyone point to a good citation of Hazlitt on this, or to any other versions of this argument from the 19th and 20th centuries?

* Not Henry Hazlitt, a 20th century economist who endorses the circular argument described above.

From today’s Washington Post, an interesting paper by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch on the correlation between skin color and economic success among recent immigrants. (Pdf here.)

Immigrants with the lightest complexions earned, on average, about 8 to 15 percent more than those with the darkest skin tone after controlling for race and country of origin as well as for other factors related to earnings, including occupation, education, language skills, work history, type of visa and whether they were married to a U.S. citizen.

In fact, Hersch estimated that the negative impact of skin tone on earnings was equal to the benefit of education, with a particularly dark complexion virtually wiping out the advantage of education on earnings….

Hersch based her results on 2,084 men and women who participated in face-to-face interviews for the federally funded 2003 New Immigrant Survey. All of the respondents had been admitted to lawful permanent resident status during the seven-month period, May to November 2003. As part of the survey, interviewers also rated the skin tone of each individual on an 11-point scale ranging from zero to 10, with 10 representing the darkest possible skin color and zero the absence of color, or albinism.

Why should pale people earn more? “I don’t think that any explanation other than discrimination is possible — and I am not one to draw such inferences lightly,” Hersch said in an e-mail. “I am stunned by the strength and consistency of the findings, even controlling for race, even controlling for nationality, and . . . everything that could possibly matter.”

This was true even for white european people; Estonians would apparently sail past swarthy Mediterranean types (not a particular finding from the paper, mind.) In her paper she mentions that among US-born black men there is also correlation between lighter skin and higher wages, but doesn’t say whether among US-born whites there is a premuim placed on paleness. I would be inclined to say not, but then, it seems hard to imagine how this pressure could apply only to immigrants. Rather striking results, though. It’s also easy to see why the nigh-transparent complexions of Irish university profs give them an edge in the US job market.

When Bill Clinton signed the (offensively-named) Federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, the looming issue was the possibility that the Hawaiian Supreme Court would legalize same-sex marriage. (In 1993, the court ruled that the state needed to show a compelling interest in order to prohibit same-sex marriage.) Since the Constitution requires that “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state,” it seemed that same-sex marriages recognized by one state would have to be recognized by the others. The Act explicitly exempted states from such a requirement. As I remember it, this was the focus of the debate.

But the Act has another implication that I don’t remember being discussed very much. It denies benefits to legally recognized same-sex spouses of federal employees. (There are currently around 1.9 [oops: million, of course] federal civil servants. I don’t know whether this prohibition applies to the additional 10.5 million individuals who are government-funded contractors or grantees.) This includes former members of Congress:

The federal government has refused to pay death benefits to the spouse of the late Gerry Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress.

Studds married Dean Hara in 2004 after gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. But Hara will not be eligible for any of Studds’ estimated $114,337 annual pension because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act bars the federal government from recognizing the couple’s marriage.

Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, Eliot Spitzer (who is leading John Faso by a 3-1 margin in the race for NY governor) says that he will introduce legislation legalizing same-sex marriage in NY.

With Blair on the way out, the British military leadership seems to be in open revolt. Following the admission last week by the army chief that the Iraq war had made terrorism worse, there’s this

The invasion of Iraq prevented British forces from helping to secure Afghanistan much sooner and has left a dangerous vacuum in the country for four years, the commander who has led the attack against the Taliban made clear yesterday.

Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of 3 Para battlegroup just returned from southern Afghanistan, said the delay in deploying Nato troops after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002 meant British soldiers faced a much tougher task now.

Asked whether the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath had led to Britain and the US taking their eye off the ball, Brig Butler said the question was “probably best answered by politicians”.

Not original, but significant by virtue of the source.

The only reading I can make of this is that the British top brass are desperate for a quick withdrawal from Iraq, as soon as Blair goes, and are applying as much public pressure as possible (even at the cost of violating conventions about military comment on political issues) to ensure that Gordon Brown does not succumb to threats or blandishments from Washington.

Update Brigadier Butler claims he was misquoted

“Daniel wrote a piece”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html for the Guardian’s blog saying that critics who wanted to reject the findings of Burnham et al.’s “Lancet paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf and believe the Iraq Body Count estimate (or similar-sized numbers) were going to have to come out and claim that the paper was fraudulent, “and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.” Well, now “David Kane has floated that balloon.”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/a_case_for_frau.shtml

*Update*: Kane’s accusations have been removed from the front page of the SSS blog. In a “follow-up,”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/removed_a_case.shtml Amy Perfors apologises for the error of judgment and says they removed the post because the “tone is unacceptable, the facts are shoddy, and the ideas are not endorsed by myself, the other authors on the sidebar, or the Harvard IQSS.” Good for them.

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Here are some comments from “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/10/estimate_of_ira.html on the “Burnham et al. paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf. People who’d like (or ought) to learn more about statistics could do worse than read Gelman and Nolan’s terrific Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am awaiting the publication of Gelman and Hill’s Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models with a degree of anticipation that seems indecent (or unhealthy) to direct at a statistics textbook. (More about the book “here”:http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052168689X. Note the blurb from a well-known blogger.)

Calling young African immigrants ‘scum’ is a brilliant move that paves the way for necessary economic reforms in France.

No, really. “See for yourself”:http://volokh.com/posts/1161028053.shtml.

Update: Commenters have suggested that this post might be read as saying that Kopel is himself a racist. That isn’t what was meant, and isn’t what I believe. The snark is because Kopel is uncritically praising a highly offensive and racist statement, but I happily accept that he’s doing so for reasons other than its racism.

I’m sure I used to be good at parking a car, but the older I get, the worse I get at it. So I was rather excessively excited to see that Lexus have invented “a car that can automatically parallel park”:http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2006/09/ls_460_parking.html. The link is a few weeks old, so apologies to those who find this kind of news old hat.