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.

Review: Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and _How You Can Fight Back_. Available from “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Jacob%20Hacker%20The%20Great%20Risk%20Shift , from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGreat-Risk-Shift-American-Retirement-%2Fdp%2F0195179501%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1161014561%3Fie%3DUTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 .

In his ethnography (PDF) of Grover Norquist’s weekly breakfast meetings, Thomas Medved tells us how Newt Gingrich sold reluctant conservatives attending the meeting on Medicare reform. [click to continue…]

A magazine called Cognitive Dissidents came online several weeks ago, so its long past time that I link to it. The contributors include a core of philosophy grad students from UW Madison, plus other philosophers and intellectuals. It has a magazine rather than a blog format, and promises regular issues rather than the chaotic and teasing semi-regular updating of the blog format. The current issue has several interesting essays on topics ranging from ethical eating through fair trade, global responsibility for poverty and the distinction between war and terrorism to reflections on the relationship between philosophizing and political activism. Worth keeping an eye on.

A close relative of mine has just started a university degree with an economics component and I’m looking to help him out a bit. Since a good few economists and teachers of economics read this blog, I’m interested in what you recommend as a really introductory text aimed at someone with no prior knowledge of the subject. Suggestions in comments, with reasons, and, perhaps some indication of whether the text in question would be a good or bad fit depending on whether the reader has a more mathematical or literary brain.

Not surprisingly, the publication by the Lancet of new estimates suggesting that over 600 000 people have died (mostly violently) in Iraq, relative to what would have been expected based on death rates in the year before the war, has provoked violent controversy. A lot of the questions raised about the earlier survey, estimating 100 000 excess deaths in the first year or so appear to have been resolved. In particular, the lower bound estimate is now around 400 000, so that unless the survey is rejected completely, there can be no doubt about catastrophic casualties.

One number that is striking, but hasn’t attracted a lot of attention is the estimated death rate from air strikes, 13 per cent of the total or between 50 000 and 100 000 people. Around half the estimated deaths in the last year of the survey, from June 2005 to June 2006. That’s at least 25 000 deaths, or more than 70 per day.

Yet reports of such deaths are very rare. If you relied on media reports you could easily conclude that total deaths from air strikes would only be a few thousand for the entire war. The difference between the numbers of deaths implied by the Lancet study and the reports that shape the “gut perceptions” that the Lancet must have got it wrong are nowhere greater than here. So are the numbers plausible?

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Everyone is much amusing by our President’s proclivity for finding things ‘unacceptable’. (As in: you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.) I got curious whether anyone had made the obvious inversion of Teddy R’s wisdom. Turns out Josh Marshall said it, back in early 2003:

Speak softly and carry a big stick. Or, speak loudly and carry a big stick. Or maybe even speak softly and get by with a small stick. But, for God’s sake, don’t speak loudly and carry a small stick. And yet that’s precisely what President Bush has been doing on the Korean Peninsula issue for two years …

Wait, it’s coming to me in a vision: speak sensibly, and carry a medium-sized stick and a medium-sized carrot (which was the fashion at the time). Damn, we all pretty much miss the Clinton years, don’t we? (You can make jokes about Clinton’s carrot if you like. Doesn’t change a thing.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that some propositions are self-evident recently. And it is hard to think about this without being reminded of the Declaration of Independence. But I realised when going back over it that I didn’t quite know what Jefferson meant at one crucial point. Maybe this is something completely obvious, or maybe there is some historical literature on this that I should know about. But it seemed to me to be an interesting interpretative question.
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