Post-Invasion Deaths in Iraq

Legitimite question – since the data in this report is a year and a half old, is there any way of extrapolating to determine the likely excess deaths throw the end of 2007?

I must confess I don’t understand Tyler’s point. Another study doesn’t make any of the old methodological criticisms valid, and doesn’t make it OK to accuse people of politically motivated fraud without evidence. (I’d also note that 11% of the clusters selected for this study were too dangerous to visit and the data was adjusted from ratios derived from the IBC estimates alone. The authors think they’ve corrected for this bias but they might not have).

also I think Les Roberts puts it rather simply: “We reported the death rate went up 2.5 fold, the Iraqi government now claims that it only doubled”. I’ve said from day one that the risk ratio is the important number rather than the product of that ratio and the population of Iraq, and looking at it in those terms very much demonstrates the extent to which these two surveys corroborate one another.

Lets not give the hysterics too much ground. This new report does not ask for a 3 times reduction in the excessive deaths estimated by the lancet report. The lancet report gave a total excessive death count at 650,000 and this new report estimates the total excessive deaths coming in at just over 400,000. Given the error in both studies, this is a pretty reasonable discrepancy.

Regarding the violent death discrepancy, its possible that in this new study there is more reporting bias regarding nature of death. Certainly, different people are asking different questions. And when you narrow down the studies to types of deaths, the error bounds are going to increase further. Finally, I think you’ll see the least amount of reporting bias if you just consider total deaths.

I was one who looked at the lancet reports, thought the distribution as to who was getting killed looked funny and the number a little high but saw it as a pretty clear indication that a lot of people were dying. This new data comes as some reassurance regarding both the distribution and the total. It may also illuminate some shortcomings in the lancet study, but that doesn’t mean the lancet study was a bad study- just not perfect.

“Recall of deaths in household surveys with very few exceptions suffer from underreporting of deaths. None of the methods to assess the level of underreporting provide a clear indication of the numbers of deaths missed in the IFHS. All methods presented here have shortcomings and can suggest only that as many as 50% of violent deaths may have gone unreported. Household migration affects not only the reporting of deaths but also the accuracy of sampling and computation of national rates of death.”

I asked this over at Deltoid and am too impatient to see if anyone will answer it there–what does this mean? Are the authors of the paper saying that their own violent death estimate might be off by a factor of two because of unreported deaths, or did they take that into account in their CI? (I’m not sure how you’d include uncounted deaths in a CI, but I’m a layperson and one who hasn’t read the paper yet.)

Apparently they did take into account the possible underreporting–

”
On the basis of simulations that took into account survey sampling errors and estimated probable uncertainty in the adjustment factors for missing clusters, in the level of underreporting, and in projected population figures, we estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq during this period (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000).”

Sounds odd to the non-expert, but I’ll take their word for it. What about the 2 million who’ve left the country–couldn’t they be people whose families suffered a larger-than-average violent death rate?

I want David Kane.

As for the discrepancy in violent deaths reported, one should note that the WHO study was done by employees of the Iraqi government. It is quite possible that household would not want to report deaths as violent to government officials.

The fact that Western media reported a much higher proportion of deaths in Bosnia than in Iraq is not surprising, I’d say: journalists weren’t targets in Bosnia; the Western media and governments had a vested interested in reporting high numbers of deaths, whereas in Iraq they don’t (or is this a “dreary political aside”?).

“The two numbers aren’t directly comparable because excess deaths due to violence are only one component of all excess deaths (e.g., from preventable disease or other causes attributable to the war).”

One of the more mystifying points of the Lancet study is that the reported number of excess deaths for most types of non-violent causes went down, and the number that study reported was almost exclusively the result of violent deaths. An AP summary of the 2006 Lancet study says “Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire.” So, while Kieran is that correct the new 150k number is not comparable to the Lancet’s 660k number. It is comparable to the claim of 600k. So there goes his primary point above.

This leads to one of the better critisms of the earlier study. While in most warzones violent deaths certainly go up, the vast majority of excess deaths are non-violent in nature, the result of indirect effects of war– interruptions in food and clean water supply, decreases in sanitation, lack of medicines and access to medical care, etc. While it is possible that the US invasion actually led to an improvement in civil services, while simultaneously provoking extreme levels of violence, that type of result is unprecedented in modern warfare, and highly unlikely.

This current study provides a number that is more in line with measurements of Iraqi deaths through other methodologies, uses better statistics (more clusters, etc.), and provides results more in line with historical patterns in other conflicts. The boosters the the earlier Lancet report do owe everyone a mea culpa.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that the critics don’t seem to know that there have been other surveys.

James Wimberly, over at Mark Kleiman’s Blog ‘The Reality-Based Community’ had a summary up back in September, comparing four surveys and the IBC project results.

Thanks for the responses.

One other thing. From memory, this new study seems to be in reasonably close agreement with Lancet1 if you look at the same time period. Lancet1’s midrange violent death toll was about 60,000 (excluding the Fallujah outlier), which for 17 months is about 120 per day. Which is essentially identical to the violent death rates in this study for the same time period–the paper says

” On the basis of population estimates shown in Table 2 of the Supplementary Appendix, the IFHS data indicate that every day 128 persons died from violence from March 2003 through April 2004, 115 from May 2004 through May 2005…”

If there hadn’t been a Lancet 2 paper, we’d all be talking about how this confirmed Lancet1 and how silly the critics of that first paper (including Iraq Body Count) look.

“…read in the National Journal …”

Anybody citing the National Journal does owe a mea culpa.

An Event in the Capital

Imagine an ordinary person –
a middle-aged man, nondescript –
walking along a street in the capital.
Imagine an improvised bomb
exploding behind him, just far enough
that he is only knocked down,
falling forward onto his hands & knees.
He hears the splatter of gunfire
& sirens converging on the wreckage,
but the man gets up & continues
to the market, dusting himself off
as he walks. He is not surprised.
Returning home in the afternoon,
he feels his neck stiffening,
a headache forming behind his eyes
& despite the heat lies down
to rest. Later, in the early evening
he is awakened by someone
at the door. His daughter-in-law’s voice.
Her friend who has walked her here
retreats, ashamed to be marked with
news of the man’s son killed
that morning in the Street of Fountains.
It is only then that the man –
ordinary, middle-aged, nondescript,
sweaty from sleeping in the heat –
notices that his ears are still ringing
from the explosion earlier
in the Street of Fountains. With his arm
carefully around her shoulders,
he takes her into the kitchen, then goes
to draw a basin of water so
they can wash their faces, both now
beyond all forms of government.

Did someone call for me? Hello Crooked Timber! I have been banned from Henry and dsquared’s threads, but, since Kieran has not banned me, I assume he does not object to my contribution. Kieran writes:

A study like this gives us good reason to substantially revise our estimate of the total number of excess deaths downward. The Burhnam et al estimate of excess deaths looks like it was too high, assuming that the new survey is basically reliable.

Exactly correct! Last year, my estimates were:

If I had to bet, I would provide much wider confidence intervals than either the Lancet authors or most of their critics. Burnham et al. (2006) estimate 650,000 “excess deaths” since the start of the war with a 95% confidence interval of 400,000 to 950,000. My own estimate would center around 300,000 and range from 0 to 1.2 million. Obviously, no one is really interested in my estimate — derived as it is from reading the literature and associate debates — but I thought it reasonable to be upfront about my prior beliefs.

In retrospect, I should have placed more weight on the informed estimates of people like Jon Pedersen. He estimated violent deaths at 100,000 (1/6th of the L2 estimate) and that sure matched up nicely with the 150,000 from IFHS. So, my new estimate is 150,000 (at first glance, this new paper seems much better than L1 or L2) with a confidence interval of 0 to 500,000.

It would be interesting to read the current estimates of folks like Kieran and dsquared. Note that I wrote a month ago:

Where is the debate going? I sometimes worry that, like so many other left/right disputes, this will never be resolved, that we will never be sure whether or not the Lancet articles were fraudulent. Will these estimates be the Chambers/Hiss debate of the 21st century? I hope not. Fortunately, other scientists are hard at work on the topic, reanalyzing the data produced in L2 and conducting new surveys. Both critics and supporters of the Lancet results should be prepared to update their estimates in the face of this new evidence. If independent scientists publish results that are similar to those of the Lancet authors, then I will recant my criticism. Will Lancet supporters like Lambert and Davies do the same when the results go against their beliefs? I have my doubts.

I should not have doubted Kieran’s willingness to update his estimates. My apologies! dsquared, on the other hand, is acting about how I suspected. Is there any new information that would cause him to doubt the L2 results?

Because more stuff is coming! What’s most interesting about IFHS is how they went out of their way to attack L2. They didn’t need to do that. They could have been much nicer. They could have spun the story as Roberts and dsquared would like to. Instead, they go for the jugular, as much as you can in the NEJM. They highlight how their confidence interval rejects the L2 range by more much more than 100,000 deaths. They don’t just argue that they are right. They argue that L2 is very, very wrong.

Who is right? Time will tell. Did everyone catch how Horton was shoving the L2 authors off the sled in the National Journal article?

Today, the journal’s editor tacitly concedes discomfort with the Iraqi death estimates. “Anything [the authors] can do to strengthen the credibility of the Lancet paper,” Horton told NJ, “would be very welcome.” If clear evidence of misconduct is presented to The Lancet, “we would be happy to go ask the authors and the institution for an official inquiry, and we would then abide by the conclusion of that inquiry.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement! Perhaps Richard Horton knows/suspects that something is not right with the L2 data . . .

Where is this going? The wheels of science grind slowly, but they grind very fine indeed. If the data underlying L1/L2 is fake, then the Lancet papers will be the most important scientific fraud of the decade. Think that is impossible? Think again.

What can the Crooked Timber community do? Act like scholars and scientists. (As Kieran does in this post.) Keep an open mind. Consider all the evidence. Look at the underlying data. Study the statistical models. Replicate the results. Make our findings public.

One small step would be for dsquared to allow me to publish comments in his threads on this topic. But perhaps open discussion and debate is not what he is looking for.

SG,

Yes, Garfield has been careful to say that mortality in Iraq went up a lot after the invasion, just not nearly as much as found in the second Lancet study.

When a coauthor disassociates himself from a study and writes a letter alleging “substantial reporting error” in his former coauthors’ study, that’s an awfully big mea culpa.

Thanks Justin. I like that guy’s website and have recommended it myself to a friend once–I much prefer it to Rummel. But one thing this controversy has hammered into me is that one should take death toll estimates with a grain of salt, unless you know how they were calculated. One thing that drives me nuts is when someone contrasts Iraq Body Count numbers with vague claims that Saddam caused the death of millions. Not that you did that, but others have.

Doesn’t that we mean that we should update our estimates of the probability of fraud?

Only once you give this new study your patented analysis technique: i.e. hint at fraud, do some bullshit calculations, then go running to Michelle Malkin and any other receptive innumerates.

After all, what study is to be taken seriously now until it receives the Kane imprimatur? Please, outline the magic confidence interval methodology you plan to employ on this new study. Or is there, as we suspect, a 99% chance that you won’t subject this one to the same ‘rigorous’ ‘oversight’?

(I’d actually think #32 a bad parody of Wavy Davy: it doesn’t have enough exclamation marks.)

As I blogged in 2006 about the Lancet study, the violence level in Iraq was so awful that it was unlikely that the study could have been carried out as randomly as described:

“Or it could be that the interviewers got in contact ahead of time with neighborhood leaders to see if their presence would be welcome to reduce their chances of being killed. (That’s not good random surveying hygiene, but are you going to blame them?) Then, in a neighborhood where the local big shot wanted their presence, he might have passed the word around to aggrieved families to get ready to tell their stories to the interviewers when they showed up. This could cause a bias upward in the number of deaths reported.

“The more I think about the mechanics of carrying out the survey on the street without getting killed, the more I suspect that the Iraqi interviewers didn’t actually implement the purely random survey design that the American professors from MIT and Johns Hopkins dreamed up for them. It would be nuts to to let luck determine which streets you’d choose, as the report claims they did. You’d want to only go where you knew you’d be safe. Then you’d tell the Americans you did exactly what they told you to do.”

I have not looked closely at the new study to see if it managed to overcome these problems.

Sorry to come in on this a bit late, but there’s a bigger problem with the 200,000 figure for the Bosnia ‘genocide’ than Chris Bertram suggests. This is that the figure is for the total deaths during the war, on all sides, and even that is likely to be an overstatement. The total deaths, civilian and military, on all sides, are now estimated at approximately 100,000.

To my knowledge, in this war, one episode has hitherto been characterised by the US-sponsored ICTY as genocide and that is the Srebrenica massacre. If people wish to characterise that as genocidal, I won’t object, although I think it’s mistaken to inflate terms in this fashion. However, the characterisation of the whole war simplistically as a genocidal process is an overhang of Western propaganda. Further, if it’s offered in comparison with Iraq, I would maintain that the Bosnian Serb leadership did not bear sole and exclusive responsibility for the war in the same way that the US bears sole and exclusive responsibility for the war on Iraq. This is far worse than anything that happened in the former Yugoslavia.

David – “After enough cases, isn’t it fairly clear that the truth is much more likely to be 150,000 than 600,000.”

This is the kind of thing that convinces me David Kane is just another hack. The 150,000 is a figure for violent deaths, the 600,000 is a figure for excess deaths (as stated repeatedly above). Skating over that difference to say “150k not 600k! 600k must be a fraud!” is a pretty obvious sign of dishonesty.

Lenin, I’ve just been looking at that study. I see the 55,261 total, but I don’t see the breakdown you give.

UPDATE: That’s because the breakdown you give is not, in fact, contained in the article you link to. It may be possible, by extrapolation from the numbers in that article to arrive at such a breakdown (I haven’t tried), and it may be that the same authors have given such a breakdown elsewhere. But it isn’t there in the article. However, the exact same breakdown is given on a number of dodgy websites (e.g freerepublic), on your blog, Lenin, and on Wikipedia.

No it’s not valid, or at least not unless you also acknowledge the existence of a big increase in the nonviolent death rate that wasn’t in the Lancet study – otherwise you’re implicitly cherry-picking the violent deaths from this one and the non-violent deaths from the Lancet and coming up with an apple/orange St. Clements’ cocktail of a total deaths number that isn’t supported by either study. The question of classification of deaths as violent or non-violent depending on who was asking was one that was raised a lot during the original discussion of Lancet 2.

I don’t see much of a point in comparing the number of casualties caused by a civil war with that caused by an unprovoked aggression.

Civil war is pretty much an act of god, one could as well include influenza epidemic or tsunami. Accident statistics is one thing, criminal statistics is another.

No it’s not valid, or at least not unless you also acknowledge the existence of a big increase in the nonviolent death rate that wasn’t in the Lancet study – otherwise you’re implicitly cherry-picking the violent deaths from this one and the non-violent deaths from the Lancet and coming up with an apple/orange St. Clements’ cocktail of a total deaths number that isn’t supported by either study.

I was responding dierctly to commenter “ray” who mistakenly assumed the 600k figure in David Kane’s comparison related to all excess death in Lancet II. This led commenter “ray” to allege “dishonesty” on the part of David. I thoguht it was worthwhile pointing out that this charge was based on “ray’s” mistaken interpretation of the 600k figure.

I don’t think I need to apologise for responding to the actual point made by the commenter I was actually adressing. The idea that I must cover all other bases in any response or stand accused of “cherry-picking” is simply preposterous.

FWIW, my take on the latest is study is mostly likely not what you imagine or infer in your previous comment. It merely confirms what a difficult business this is. Lancet II and the NEJM study can’t even agree pre-war mortality rates.

Lancet 2
Pre-invasion mortality rates = 5.5 per 1000 people per year

NEJM
Pre-invasion mortality rates = 3.17 per 1000 per year

If the Lancet estimate for pre-invasion mortality is the more accurate and substituted for the NEJM figure, the NEJM increase in mortality drops significnatly (3.17 repalced by 5.5):

NEJM
Increase in mortality rate post invasion = 6.01.3/5.5 = 1.09

Conversely, if the NEJM figure for pre-invasion mortality is nearer the truth and included in the Lancet calculation, the increase in mortality shoots up (5.5 replaced by 3.17):

Lancet II
Increase in mortality rate post invasion = 13.3/3.17 = 4.2

If two accountants both manage to reconcile the bank for a company, but one reports a couple of million adidtional debits and credits in the process, you get a qualified audit report.

Unless hard evidence comes to light of fundamental flaws in one or other of the studies, isn’t it simply the case that all bets are off?

Mea culpa (there had to be one)- the Lancet’s figure for excess deaths was 650k, not 600.
But if the Lancet says most of the excess deaths were violent, while the IFHS says that only half of the excess deaths were violent, then maybe 150 and 600 are not the numbers to look at.

“the new study is convincing evidence that the overall death toll in Iraq is significantly lower than had at first been feared by most commentators here on CT and elsewhere”

When I read the original debate here on CT, I got the impression that many commenters were not full of fear that the numbers were so high. They seemed strangely satisfied. Far be it from me to ascribe motives, but I wondered whether they were keen to use the figures to criticise the war…

Regards,

H.

dsquared writes:

the new study has lower violent deaths but higher non-violent deaths.

Hey, dsquared! Any chance that I will be allowed to participate in your future Lancet threads? Or are you only interested in having a discussion with people who agree with you? Just asking!

And, not that I speak on behalf of the Lancet-skeptic community, but we don’t really care about non-violent deaths. The (statistically insignificant) non-violent death increase in L2 was plausible. I have never seen anyone deny this. As Michael Spagat writes:

The main problem with the comparison highlighted by the L2 authors [in asserting that L2 validates L1] is that it is of all excess deaths, not just violent deaths. All suggestions of possible bias in L2 that we know of, sampling or non-sampling, pertain to violent deaths. The available facts simply do not support a claim that L1 and L2 suggest very similar numbers of violent deaths. By persistently conflating non-violent deaths with violent deaths the L2 authors have obscured this essential point

Exactly right. Now, given all the time in the world, we could have a fun-filled discussion of what the non-violent death rate in Iraq was, is and will be. But no Lancet skeptic really cares. We just think that the violent death rates in L1 and L2 are ludicrously high and that the IFHS results support our position.

And, if you push this line, you need to explain not just why I am wrong, but why the IFHS authors are wrong. (They clearly discount the increase in non-violent deaths as being a function of reporting biases. That is, if you did the same survey in the US, you would “see” a dramatic increase in mortality because people are much better at recalling deaths in 2006 than those in 2002, whatever the cause.) Anyway, good luck arguing that the IFHS authors don’t know their what they are doing. They clearly do.

ray,

I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. My point is that even if the NEJM non-violent deaths made up the entire shortfall to match Lancet’s total excess deaths, what would this prove? We’ve arrived at the same number, yes, but via two entirely contradictory means. The violent and non-violent components in at least one study must be wrong (because both can’t be right), but we don’t know which? The two studies don’t corroborate each other just becasue the totals are similar when each of the equivalent components in the two studies are miles apart.

Sure, it could be that we simply have a death classification problem across the two studies. Of gargantuan proportions.

Kane:

They clearly discount the increase in non-violent deaths as being a function of reporting biases. That is, if you did the same survey in the US, you would “see” a dramatic increase in mortality because people are much better at recalling deaths in 2006 than those in 2002, whatever the cause

Study:

Overall mortality from nonviolent causes was about 60% as high [sic] in the post-invasion period as in the pre-invasion period. Although recall bias may contribute to the increase, since deaths before 2003 were less likely to be reported than more recent deaths, this finding warrants further analysis.

This has been episode XXV in the series “Why David Kane Is Banned”.

Tim Lambert,

No, your post does not demonstrate that the National Journal misrepresented Garfield, it just demonstrates that Garfield thinks that the invasion caused an awful lot of deaths. I’d be more inclined to take your word for it if you reported facts that don’t fit your conclusion, like the fact that Garfield asked for his name to be removed from the Lancet II study.

#62 Huh? I claim something and you quote the part of the paper that supports my claim (and that I was thinking of) and then this is a reason for banning me. I don’t get it.

Kane:

They clearly discount the increase in non-violent deaths as being a function of reporting biases

Study:

Although recall bias may contribute to the increase […] this finding warrants further analysis

Kane:

Huh? I claim something and you quote the part of the paper that supports my claim

Me:

Episode XXVI.

#66—They didn’t “clearly discount” the increase because of recall bias. They said recall bias might contribute to the increase.

#69, for example: someone was stabbed and died three weeks later from sepsis that could’ve been easily treated if antibiotics were available – is this a violence-related mortality?

I think this is wrong. Whether someone’s dead or not is a fact and is verifiable; what they died of is an opinion and much more subject to obfuscation.

Since the Lancet II study asked for death certificates, it would be useful to know how the cause of death recorded on them matched up with the reported cause of death. Too bad the Lancet II researchers didn’t bother with this sort of cross-check.

74: What are you talking about, Ragout? Yes they did. It’s on the second page of the Burnham et al study:

“At the conclusion of household interviews
where deaths were reported, surveyors requested to see a copy of any death certificate and its presence was recorded. Where differences between the household account and the cause mentioned on the certificate existed, further discussions were sometimes needed to establish the primary cause of death.”

It is a bit of a pity that the IFHS survey didn’t ask for death certificates, although one has to recognise that they were carrying out the survey for their purposes, not my personal convenience.

Tim, Can you provide your analysis of the claim that the violent death rate is higher in IFHS than L1? Don’t forget to include Anbar in both. It’s part of Iraq, after all. (I could be wrong about this. Again, I have just skimmed IFHS.)

Daniel/abb1,

I understand completely. As I said, I can easily imagine scenarios that could either lead to confusion about how the dead died and/or elicit less-than-accurate responses to the question of how they died. But again, assuming the clusters in both studies are representative, that confusion should be reflected in the results of both. There’s no good reason why more people should be dying from sepsis after three weeks in one study and not the other.

The distribution of violent and non-violent deaths in each study is certainly influenced by who asks the question, how it is asked and the genuine confusion about the exact circumstances of death on the part of the interviewees, but these factors cannot explain why that distribution is turned on its head from study to study….again, assuming both sets of clusters are representative.

And for the record, and despite what might be thought, I have no interest in advancing the merits of one study over the other. Insofar as I have a position on this stuff at all, it’s only that I think anomalies – or flat out contradictions, if you prefer – such as the violent/non-violent distribution from study to study, undermine the credibility of all such studies in what are effectively war-zones.

but these factors cannot explain why that distribution is turned on its head from study to study

well, basically L1 and IFHS seem to be pretty consistent, but L2 (which was the only one in which death certificates were systematically checked) is different.

#79: no, this could easily have been an honest mistake and Ragout (although he disagrees with me on a number of issues relevant to the surveys and has done since L1) has a pretty good track record of honesty. You really have to make an effort to get banned.

ragout, the National Journal claimed that Garfield had rejected the Lancet number and reduced his estimate of deaths to 250,000. I asked him if this was true and he said that it wasn’t. The only source for your alleged fact is the National Journal who have proved themselves to be biased and unreliable.

Ragout, you appear to be operating quite a bit of a double standard here;

There was no way for the survey’s supervisors, never mind other researchers, to verify that death certificates were ever examined. The Lancet researchers simply didn’t perform the kind of routine quality control checks conducted by most survey researchers, such as those conducting the ILCS Iraq survey or the IFHS survey.

given that the ILCS and IFHS surveys didn’t check death certificates at all. I am not a big fan of this nitpicking Milloyish approach at the best of times (I’ve noted above that the Iraqi Health Ministry is quite sensible to concentrate its research efforts on things that will help improve the health of the Iraqi people rather than settle weblog arguments for me), but at least apply it consistently.

And I wonder how these discussions about the cause of death were conducted in Kurdistan, given that Lancet II employed no Kurdish-speaking interviewers?

I am hazarding a guess here that most Iraqi Kurds also speak Arabic.

Sorry David, but Anbar doesn’t belong in the comparison. In L1, the Fallujah cluster was so different that you couldn’t get a reliable estimate if you included it. The IFHS wasn’t able to properly survey Anbar.

It’s par for the course with you that by L1 you don’t mean the estimate that the authors gave and everyone else means.

Abb1,

Yep, that’s possible I suppose. I don’t know how likely, though, given there is also a sizeable discrepancy in the violent/non-violent distribution between L1 and L2, where I assume (and I know how wrong that could be) the same methodology was employed.

Likewise, what happens when the response to the question “How did your relative(s) die?” is “We don’t know”. I imagine there are more than a few cases of people leaving home in the morning and simply never coming back. Are the studies consistent in how they classify these cases of unknown cause of death?

Tim Lambert,

We merely have to read Garfield’s published letter to the Lancet where he writes that his former coauthors’ study contains “substantial reporting error,” to know that it is you who are misrepresenting Garfield’s views, not the National Journal.

I am hazarding a guess here that most Iraqi Kurds also speak Arabic.

That is not my understanding. It’s worth noting that both the ILCS and the IFHS survey instruments were translated into both Arabic and Kurdish.

John M, to you the new study isn’t not 200,000 dead (or whatever), but 400,000 not-dead (or whatever, compared to the old study).You are easily made happy, John M. I envy you! Things still look pretty bad to me.

And, by the way, I am still working on a reply to Kieran’s post from 2006 on my fraud discussion. My rough draft of that reply is here.N’i>

Still working, a year later? It didn’t take Melville that long to write Moby Dick.*

*Now the motherfucker is going to go to Wiki to find out how long it really did take, and come back here shouting “Truth is important”.

Tim writes:

It’s par for the course with you that by L1 you don’t mean the estimate that the authors gave and everyone else means.

Here is the opening sentences of the methods section of L1.

The risk of death was estimated to be 2·5-fold (95% CI 1·6–4·2) higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja.

The authors don’t give an estimate of 2.5 for all of Iraq? I am making this up?

The issue before us is: How does the 151,000 estimate of violent deaths in all of Iraq from IFHS compare with L1? Now, since the surveys use different terminology over a different time scale, we will not be able to make an exact comparison. But, L1 reports 73 violent deaths in all of Iraq post-invasion compared to 1 pre-invasion (from the phantom US bombing runs, no doubt.) (See Table 2.) Speaking very roughly each excess death in the sample corresponds to 3,000 or so deaths in the population. So, for all of Iraq, there were around 200,000 violent deaths in L1 through September 2004. (I am obviously skirting over the, in this context, unimportant distinction between violent deaths and excess violent deaths.)

IFHS estimates 151,000 violent deaths through June 2006. Relative to IFHS, the L1 estimate is ludicrously high.

Again, this is just back of the envelope, but I wanted to help Tim clean out his garage, following Kieran’s kind suggestion.

Now, Tim might argue that we need to exclude Falluja for this that or the other reason. Fine. If the L1 authors had just dropped Falluja from all of their analysis (or included it everywhere or done both), I wouldn’t have objected so much. But they picked and chose. Yet, in this context, you don’t get to play that game. The IFHS authors estimate 151,000. That is their number. You can either try to get numbers out of L1 that are comparable to that (as I do above). Or you can claim that such a comparison is impossible. But you can’t just claim the comparison works for the subset of the IFHS data that you want to look at.

Daniel,

I am also not interested in nitpicking the Lancet study. It’s been trashed now by so many highly respected researchers that it’s clear that it has little credibility. See the NEJM article, which states flat out that “the 2006 study by Burnham et al. considerably overestimated the number of violent deaths.” Or see the many letters published in the Lancet criticizing the Lancet II study, including one by a former coauthor. Or see the critical article in Nature. Or see critical statements by Iraq mortality experts like Beth Osborne Daponte or Jon Pederson, who says thinks the Lancet numbers are “high, and probably way too high. I would accept something in the vicinity of 100,000 but 600,000 is too much.”

Neil,

“Most Kurds are also bilingual” doesn’t mean “all Kurds,” or even “60% of Kurds.” Nor does it tells us how fluent in Arabic they are. I suspect that there’s a reason why high-quality surveys in Iraq translate their questionnaire into Kurdish.

John Emerson,

It’s true that it doesn’t make much difference to our judgements about the Iraq war whether 600,000 have died or “only” 100,00. But it’s still worth debating methods for conducting mortality surveys, because lots of these surveys are being conducted all around the world.

On the other hand, it isn’t all that worthwhile debating Lancet II anymore, because a consensus has pretty much emerged in the epidemiological community that its estimates are very unreliable.

On the other hand, it isn’t all that worthwhile debating Lancet II anymore, because a consensus has pretty much emerged in the epidemiological community that its estimates are very unreliable

Ragout, this is a very specific and very extreme claim which you cannot possibly substantiate (particularly, if your post #100 was your best shot at doing so, it’s pathetic).

Here’s what L1 says:

“We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000–194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.”

Notice how they don’t give a number for an estimate that includes Falluja. Only a David Kane could read that sentence and claim that the L1 estimate wasn’t 98,000.

L2: 655,000 excess deaths, 2.4 fold increase in death rate post-invasion

NEJM: 430,000 excess deaths, 2 fold increase in death rate post invasion

L1: 98,000 excess deaths for Mar03-Sep04

NEJM: 99,500 excess deaths for Mar03-Sep04

How can that boost any claim of L1 and L2 fraud is beyond me.

“You are easily made happy, John M. I envy you! Things still look pretty bad to me.”

And they look pretty bad to me too (I don’t think I claimed to be ‘happy’ about any of this). 150,000 violent deaths is a truly shocking thing to consider. But surely you can be shocked at the reality and still take some relief from the knowledge or belief that the number of dead is less than you had at first feared. Regardles of the horror it is surely good news by any dfinition that fewer died than had been feared? A casual reader of Crooked Timber could go away with the sense that many contributors are disappointed that the Lancet study has been discredited (if it has been) when surely they should be pleased to discover that hundreds of thousands of people that they had thought to have been killed, are, in fact alive.

But it’s still worth debating methods for conducting mortality surveys, because lots of these surveys are being conducted all around the world.

I absolutely agree. But why has the Iraq survey got 10 or 100 times more attention than the Ruanda and Bosnia surveys put together? Why do the same people nit-picking the Lancet story throw out ex recto estimates of the number of Saddam’s victims?

The serious studies you allude to are very good, important things, but it’s not for me to participate in them because I’m unqualified. What’s going on here is something completely different — a tendentious effort to Ratherize the Lancet study. I’m happy to jump in on that one.

“Why do the same people nit-picking the Lancet story throw out ex recto estimates of the number of Saddam’s victims?”

Well, most of the technical details about surveys are outside my range of competence, though I hang out on the fringes of this debate, but we all know the answer to this question.

On a related topic, we shouldn’t let the MSM get away with comparing apples to oranges. Not that we have any actual say in the matter, but I once saw a NYT article comparing the Iraq Body Count numbers with the survey numbers for the Congo War. It’s perfectly acceptable to cite Les Roberts when he’s talking about huge death tolls that can’t (or aren’t) blamed on the US.

That’s one of the complaints I’ve had about IBC. They’ve established a new level of evidence that has to be reached when talking about US-caused atrocities, but you can cite any damn estimate you want for anything else, the larger the better if it can’t be blamed on our country.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me David Kane is just another hack. The 150,000 is a figure for violent deaths, the 600,000 is a figure for excess deaths (as stated repeatedly above).

No, no.

Lancet II (2006) estimated excess, violent deaths at 601,027 (426,369 to 793,663 at 95% confidence interval) for the 40 month post-invasion period. The IFHS/NEJM study estimates all violent deaths at 151,000 (104,000 to 223,000) for the same period. Of course, Lancet found so few pre-invasion violent deaths that several of the authors considered nearly all violent deaths to be excess, and NEJM finds the violent death rate increased 10x pre and post invasion.

The location estimates are interesting. Lancet estimated 156,000 deaths in Baghdad; NEJM estimated 81,000. The major difference was the death estimates for high-mortality provinces — Lancet estimates many more there than NEJM has.It could be that Iraqi health ministry personnel were less likely to sample properly in the high-conflict provinces, and so under-counted there.

The daily death toll for the Lancet is 80% higher than the NEJM for the first year of the war, but takes off after that. So NEJM and Lancet disagree strongly over death rates after April 2004, when the Shia insurgencies really take off.

Remember that both Lancet and NEJM are not counting only combat-related violence but all violence, so criminal murders and shootings, revenge killings, and murderous brawls all get counted along with gun battles, airstrikes, and car bombs. In that context, the Lancet data seems less startling though still awful. The household surveys will pick up violent deaths that the media ignore because they are not major bombings or battles.

Let’s put it this way. IBC daily death tolls are on par with the US daily homicide toll (roughly 43 per day; 16,000+ per year). Does that seem plausible? NEJM has the daily Iraq toll at about 3 times the US toll? Does that seem plausible?

Well, the U.S. has a population ten times larger than Iraq, so the NEJM study would be a rate thirty times higher than the U.S., not three times higher. But thirty times higher still seems not at all unreasonable on the face of it — the U.S. is a very peaceful country.

Doing survey based estimates of mortality in the midst of a civil war, while millions of refugees are fleeing the country, will always be fraught with error. But it now seems clear that by the end of 2007 there were many hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion. 200,000 seems quite low for total excess deaths, when you count the non-violent ones (read some of the anecdotal stuff on what happened to Iraqi medical and hospital services in 2004-2007). 400-500,000 seems quite reasonable, based on multiple surveys now.

I suppose a half a million civilian dead conclusively proves that the warbloggers have been right all along.

Re 121, sure but how much worse would you expect overall violence to be in Iraq than the US? 50x, 100x, 200x? At 100x, divide by 11 to account for the pop. differences (300m v. 27m roughly), so 9*43 gets you 391 deaths per day, x 30 days per month over 40 months, at we are within the lower bound of the Lancet confidence interval.

The Lancet finding sounds implausible because we hear 600,000 or 500 per day and can’t get our heads around such numbers. How could we miss an average of 500 each day — so some days would have thousands of deaths and some maybe a score? But we’re not missing them in a context of stable government but in a context of widespread absence of government. Nil effective policing, criminal gangs, undemocratic local rulers, short-tempers under stress and privation, and add on the invasion and insurgency battles, ethnic murders, and terrorist attacks and you get a lot of dead people really fast.

A casual reader of Crooked Timber could go away with the sense that many contributors are disappointed that the Lancet study has been discredited (if it has been) when surely they should be pleased to discover that hundreds of thousands of people that they had thought to have been killed, are, in fact alive.

I deliberately set fire to an apartment building where 30 people lived. I thought I’d killed half of them, but now I’ve learned that only 13 died, not 15.

Joy!

I suppose that, on the other hand, this new study does confirm something that’s becoming increasingly clear with time – namely that, contrary to what some people were telling us at the time, the sanctions on Iraq were an extremely humane policy, which, far from killing people, was actually saving lives relative to neighbouring countries:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782

The pre-invasion rates of adult mortality from any cause per 1000 person-years were 2.0 for men and 0.8 for women in the IFHS, with a relatively small proportion of deaths attributed to violent causes. In a regional comparison for 2002, a study by the WHO estimated that in Syria and Jordan, the rates of death for adults were 4.2 for men and 2.8 for women. In Iran, the rates were 4.7 and 2.9, respectively.

So while we’re rightly disgusted by Western foreign policy as regard the war in Iraq, maybe we could just take one moment to congratulate the framers of that other piece of foreign policy, the sanctions regime – kudos to Bill Clinton, Maddy Albright and all those others who framed it.

Was #128 serious? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Anyway, on the off chance that it was, weird as that seems, most people agree that Oil for Food greatly decreased the effects of the sanctions on mortality. It’s doubtful that the sanctions actually improved life expectancy–if so, then those free traders have really been selling us a bill of goods.

Excluding Fallujah, there were about 21 violent deaths in the Lancet1 survey. As a rough estimate, each death represents 3000 real deaths, so there were about 60,000 deaths in L1. That’s crude, but those were the numbers at stake.

This was understood by everyone on both sides of the issue back in the good old days, when the debate was between those who claimed that 60,000 violent deaths by Sept 2004 was ridiculously high, given Iraq Body Count’s much lower figures. At the time they were estimating something like 15,000 (this was later updated to a slightly higher number, around 18-19,000, I think).

David wishes to turn this into part of his morality play about the evil Lancet1 authors, but the Lancet skeptics in 2004-2006 rejected the possibility that the IBC number was 3-4 times lower than the total number of violent deaths. That’s what the argument was about. And the IFHS paper now supports a violent death rate that was rejected as far too high by Lancet skeptics in the 2004-2006 period.

Was that a violent death interval you are calculating, scent? Because it’s not the one in the paper.

Um, no. I figured like this, let P be the population of Iraq (assumed to be more or less constant; it’s not, but close enough.) Let PoV be the rate of post-invasion violent deaths and PrV the rate of pre-invasion violent. So then the excess deaths due to violence is given by:

3(PoV-PrV)P=150,000, and solving for P, the population, we get:

P=150,000/[3(PoV-PrV)].
Now let PoA be the rate of all post-invasion deaths, PrA be the rate of all pre-invasion deaths. Then the excess of all deaths will then be given by:

3(PoA-PrA)P=E.

Using our substitution for P:

3(PoA-PrA)*150,000/[3(PoV-PrV)]=[(PoA-PrA)/(PoV-PrV)]*150,000=E.

Now we just substitute the values given in the table to get:
[(6.01-3.17)/(1.09-0.10)]*150,000~400,000

Note that the assumptions are a)that the number of excess violent deaths is understood to be 150,000, and b)the rates in the table are accurate. I am most specifically _not_ calculating the number of excess violent deaths, I am taking it as a given, something that everyone agrees upon, and saying that _if_ this is true, _then_ the overall excess must be on the order of 400K, which is in agreement with the lower bound of the Lancet estimate.

I don’t see any obvious mistakes here. Can anyone spot any flaws in the reasoning? Note that the three in the above formulas come from the number of years the study covered, and it doesn’t really matter since it cancels out at the end. Also, since the number in the square brackets is just a ratio, I didn’t bother to convert from thousands of person years – the units cancelled there too.

Okay. This is a number I came up with earlier on a simplifying assumption that 1.09 and 1.09-0.10 were about the same, and, as you say, it’s still approximately 400,000, the lower range of the Lancet study. So how can anyone say that these two surveys don’t agree with each other?

Are there any other errors? Frankly, this seemed like a no-brainer calculation, and two crow that the studies are wildly disparate means that not only do you have to be a hopeless partisan, you have to be an innumerate hopeless partisan.

Leaving out the little “please show your work” comment, which is too smug for words, this piece of mendacity and bigotry by David Kane is really fucking stupid:

The L1 estimate for all deaths was 98,000. The question is: What does L1 tell us about violent deaths? We need something from L1 to compare to the 151,000 figure from IFHS. Given that we do not have access to the code, we do not know what the L1 authors would say. They do not provide an estimate for violent deaths. So, we need to look at the (limited) raw data that they supply, make some assumptions and do the best we can. That’s what I do above.

Here we have a paper (L1) which gives an estimate of excess deaths but no estimate of violent deaths; and another paper (IFHS) which gives an estimate of violent deaths but no estimate of excess deaths.

But Kane’s “woe is me” tone is simply dripping with contempt for those evil lancet authors who couldn’t furnish him with BOTH counts. Why doesn’t he reserve that tone for IFHS? Why is it L1’s fault that Kane has to do “the best we can”, not IFHS’s?

Kane you are a right twat.

I just know that if IFHS had collected death certificates and L2 hadn’t, Kane would be all over L2 because of it. So would Ragout. But instead the opposite occurred, so Kane ignores it and continues to pretend that the IFHS data (which he hasn’t seen) is better. And Ragout complains about the level of oversight of the death certificates

You guys really are beyond the pale.

One hidden assumption in that calculation (to get 393,000) is that the amount of underreporting is the same across the board.

The IFHS study calculates a post-invasion violent death rate of 1.09 (per thousand per year), before correcting for underreporting. But the authors note that underreporting of deaths is common in household surveys, because of factors like a household breaking up after a death. They use a something called the “growth balance method” (though they note that it is not entirely appropriate for Iraq, since it assumes a stable population) to estimate that the level of completeness in the reporting of death was 62% (that is, that 62% of deaths could be found by their sampling method and 38% would be missed). Then, for reasons that I don’t understand, they use 35% as their estimated level of underreporting (which means 65% as the level of completeness), and estimate the post-invasion violent death rate at 1.09/0.65=1.67 after correcting for underreporting. Then they translate this rate, 1.67, into the death toll of 151,000.

The rest of the death rates that they report in the paper do not get translated into number of deaths or corrected for underreporting, but anyone can do those calculations using the numbers that they report for the post-invasion violent death rate. If you take any death rate referring to the post-invasion period and multiply it by 151000/1.67, then you are simply translating it into estimated number of deaths (March 2003 through June 2006). If you instead multiply it by 151000/1.09 (as most people have been doing), then you are correcting for underreporting (assuming a 65% level of completeness) and translating the rate into number of deaths. Thus, 393,000 is the estimated number of excess deaths, March 2003 through June 2006, after correcting for underreporting. (6.01-3.17)*(151000/1.67) = 257,000 is the estimated number of excess deaths, March 2003 through June 2006, without correcting for underreporting. And 393,000 simply equals 257,000/0.65.

I’m guessing that it’s better to include the correction for underreporting, as people have been doing, although I don’t know enough about this sort of research to be sure. I think we may want to correct for underreporting when comparing death rates with the Lancet studies, as borwnie does in #52. Assuming the 65% level of completeness applies across the board, the estimated IFHS mortality rates are 3.17/0.65 = 4.88 pre-invasion and 6.01/0.65 = 9.25 post-invasion, which is more in line with the Lancet2 estimates of 5.5 and 13.3.

How sensitive are these results to the estimate of underreporting? With a 65% level of completeness, the estimated number of excess deaths is already equal to the lower bound of the Lancet2 confidence interval (393,000-943,000). With a 58% level of completeness, the IFHS estimate of pre-invasion mortality rate would equal the Lancet estimate, 5.5, and the estimated number of excess deaths would reach 446,000 (since 3.17/5.50 = 257000/446000 = 0.58). With a 51% level of completeness, the excess death estimate reaches 500,000 (since 257000/500000 = 0.51). If the level of completeness was only 39%, then the IFHS excess death estimate would reach the Lancet2 estimate of 655,000 (since 257000/655000 = 0.39). Which of these numbers are plausible? I don’t know, but the IFHS authors gave their 95% confidence interval for the level of completeness as 50%-80%, which suggests that 500,000 excess deaths should be inside the confidence interval.

So I’m guessing there’s nothing wrong with the calculation from the tables then? If so, I think that’s all you really need to say, no need to fiddle around any more with the confidence intervals. After all, the original claim wasn’t that the Lancet study was off by ten percent or twenty percent; the claim was that it was off by a whopping 300 percent.

So not only are the findings of the two studies compatible, even if they disagree by as much as say, 30% (either way!), then they are still much closer to each other than either one is to the original administration estimate. That was on the order of, what, 50K? In which case, if this latest study is supposed to be the definitive, then we’re talking not 50 percent off, or 300% off, but a whopping 800% off.

The bottom line is, this study vindicates the Lancet survey, and torpedo’s the original administration figures.

Oh, if it’s a question of the Bush Administration’s figures, I could flip coins or read the entrails of road kill and get better numbers.

We’re reconsidering Little Green Footballs around here. Without entirely agreeing with our adversaries, we can stil learn from them. We’re Fascists, you know.

Gross Distortions, Sloppy Methodology and Tendentious Reporting
http://counterpunch.org/andrew01122008.html

Almost five years into the destruction of Iraq, the orthodox rule of thumb for assessing statistical tabulations of the civilian death toll is becoming clear: any figure will do so long as it is substantially lower than that computed by the Johns Hopkins researchers in their 2004 and 2006 studies. Their findings, based on the most orthodox sampling methodology and published in the Lancet after extensive peer review, estimated the post-invasion death toll by 2006 at about 655,000. Predictably, this shocking assessment drew howls of ignorant abuse from self-interested parties, including George Bush (“not credible”) and Tony Blair.

Now we have a new result complied by the Iraqi Ministry of Health under the sponsorship of the World Health Organization and published in the once reputable New England Journal of Medicine, (NEJM) estimating the number of Iraqis murdered, directly or indirectly, by George Bush and his willing executioners at 151,000–far less than the most recent Johns Hopkins estimate. Due to its adherence to the rule cited above, this figure has been greeted with respectful attention in press reports, along with swipes at the Hopkins effort as having, as the New York Times had to remind readers, “come under criticism for its methodology.”

Oh, look it’s David Kane and he’s comparing this website to Little Green Footballs. Now that’s not something that happens every single fucking day…

“Their estimates for the Sunni areas where they couldn’t go seems like a big one.”

Yeah, that’s one of the points made either at this blog or over at Tim Lambert’s.

Replace NEJM authors with Lancet2 authors, David. It’ll save me the trouble of typing a reply.

Here’s a bonus, though–it’s common in science for two different groups to derive two different answers and to have each side vehemently certain that they are correct. Really, you could have thought of this yourself.

David, Lancet 2 could easily be wrong. The fact remains that your criticisms have been _more_ wrong. Let’s not lose sight of that fact.

Kane is the George Chuvalo of rational argument.

“The asteroid theory on how the dinosaurs became extinct was highly entertaining in part because of how nasty it was. ”

How nasty the debate was, I mean. Condescension and contempt flung in all directions. I’m still not sure if there’s a consensus.

I agree that those are good example. But read what I wrote! I claimed that “it is not that common to have such vehement disagreement in the elite literature.” Which part of “not that common” do you fail to understand? Let’s be specific. There are hundreds of articles in the NEJM every year. What percent are as critical of other peer-reviewed articles as IFHS is of L2? Certainly less than 10%, even 5%. My guess would be less than 1%, but we can quibble about that. This is what I mean by “not that common.”

yes David, why aren’t you troubled by the high response rate?

And how can you claim IFHS disputes L2 when its point estimate of total excess death is contained in the confidence limits of L2?

In fact, if I were Roberts, I would be very worried about the IFHS authors getting so pissed off

funny. David is on a crusade to establish the category of “getting pissed off” into the mainstream of academic discourse.

and he is obviously leading by example..

dsquared,

If you had told me that not citing my website was a condition for posting on your thread, then I would have abided by your request. Can I post in your next Lancet thread of I don’t link to my blog? (It is easy enough to just copy and paste the arguments from there to CT, if that is preferable to you.)

Or perhaps you prefer the sort of conversation which that thread degenerated in to without the presence of informed, dissenting views . . .

And I am working on something about response rates. But dsquared implies that I am a bad person if I link to it from a Crooked Timber comment. Quite the dilemma!

When Kane is banned, none of the other Lancet-deniers show up either. We were waiting for them on Dsquared’s thread, but only a guy named “a” showed up, and he only wanted talk about The Surge.

Doesn’t this confirm the Kane Zombie Army theory? Perhaps Lancet-denial is a little cottage industry run out of Kane’s basement, or maybe a flying-saucer-cult type of youth group led by a charismatic leader.

As it was, without Kane we spent a very productive afternoon working on the theory and practice of liberal fascism.

“I don’t see much of a point in comparing the number of casualties caused by a civil war with that caused by an unprovoked aggression.

Civil war is pretty much an act of god, one could as well include influenza epidemic or tsunami. Accident statistics is one thing, criminal statistics is another.
Posted by abb1”

My God, that’s morally obtuse. Civil war as an act of god? Civil war is people fighting people, not a big wave drowning people. And, does this REALLY need pointing out: Civil war is just as capable as war between countries of involving unprovoked aggression on one side or both.

My criticism of the Lancet study is unchanged: You poll people in a war zone like Iraq, the people you’re asking questions of aren’t trying to recollect the truth, they’re trying to figure out what utterance is least likely to cause a death squad to visit their house in the middle of the night.

You can calculate error bars due to sample size, due to renormalizing, and all sorts of things. But there’s no mathematics for, “What should I say to keep my family from getting killed?” Pollsters need some more humility about the limits of their craft.

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm
Where does this write up ‘fit in’?

No, Brett, in a typical civil war millions of people living in the same geographical area are fighting each other. The reasons are usually structural and there’s nothing you can do about it; it’s a destiny.

Giving the order to invade is a completely different story.

Unless, of course, you’re a proponent of the hard-determinist view, in which case everything is destiny.

No.

And, by the way, I am still working on a reply to Kieran’s post from 2006 on my fraud discussion. My rough draft of that reply is here.

We should expect a rough draft of David’s work on the response issue in mid 2009.

David, if you’re having trouble getting started, why don’t you use your piece on Burnham et al as a template? You’d only have to change the title slightly: IFHS The Case for Fraud sounds pretty punchy to me. Then you could probably adapt a lot of the copy you wrote for the old one; or if you’re really pressed for time, just paste some it in verbatim. Like this:

I can not find a single example of a survey with a 99%+ response rates in a large sample for any survey topic in any country ever.

Or this:

We know very little about these Iraqi teams. Besides monetary incentives to give the … authors the answers they wanted, the Iraqis may have had political reasons as well. … How can anyone know that they are telling the truth?

See? It won’t take you very long at all once you get down to it.

“I claimed that “it is not that common to have such vehement disagreement in the elite literature.” Which part of “not that common” do you fail to understand?”

I fail to understand the part where it is at all relevant to any point you wish to establish. It’s common to have controversies in science–it’s not exactly surprising to find that it is difficult to measure mortality in a war zone. You informed me in your usual condescending tone that it is rare to find disagreements in the elite literature. Tell me how many papers have been published where people try to determine death rates inside a country plagued by death squads, terrorists, and an occupying power that isn’t terribly concerned about the innocence or guilt of the people it arrests. How common are disagreements under those circumstances?

A country in which none of the players is at all interested in having accurate mortality statistics, and in fact all of them seem actively not to want them.

Wrap it up and send it in, Engels! (I mean David). Ya got a winner there!

I see your point Brett but I have a suspicion it doesn’t hold in situations where civil wars start. Your neighbours start shooting you, you start shooting back.

I think what Abb1 is trying to say is that, if someone murders you, the arbitrary nature of their actions – and your complete lack of control over them – make it like an act of god. Similarly when people decide to start executing everyone whose surname starts with B. They may have made a conscious decision, but to you it might as well have been an act of God. And as a consequence your actions are out of your control to some extent.

David, “Person A made a convincing argument that B may have happened” and “B may have happened” are different conclusions. You do know that don’t you?

Why would the data collectors lie about a violent death and then report they had not seen the death certificate? Wouldn’t they lie about both those things? Isn’t it more likely that the respondents lied about a violent death and refused to reveal a death certificate, or didn’t have it?

The obvious charitable interpretation of this is that the Lancet study may misattribute causes of death due to the survey respondents being unwilling to tell the truth. That’s what a reasonable observer would do (and what Ms. Goldin appears to be doing in your quote, without actually saying the National Journal are wankers).

But if the Lancet study did misattribute causes of death, that simply means that the violent death subcategory of the total excess deaths is also confirmed by the IFHS study. Which is why, I presume, you choose to blame the study authors for fraud.

I went and read Goldin’s post, and _shockingly_ David Kane misrepresented it. How do this keep happening to you, David? Are you just unlucky?

But it’s not person’s acting, when a million of persons are acting. It becomes a statistical certainty.

Take Bosnia. They were a part of Yugoslavia, everything was fine. Then a majority voted to secede from Yugoslavia while a significant minority strongly felt they shouldn’t secede. So, naturally, they started fighting. This is not a person’s doing; there’s no single individual or a group of individuals to blame here, it’s the matter of social, religious, ethnic and other dynamics.

I “misrepresented” Goldin? Hmmm. Am I imagining that she used the words “tweaked” and “inventiveness” in discussing her concerns about the data?

David, did you _read_ Goldin’s post, or just the one sentence containing the words “convincing” and “tweaked”? In the rest of the post, she politely points out that any identified statistical anomoly is probably the result of data mining: if you look over any data set long enough you will find an anamoly. Any statistical inference that you do that does not correct for the fact that you looked at the data first to find an anomaly to test for is invalid, and unless you adjust your test statistics. Did you mention _any_ of that in your comment? What’s that? No you didn’t? Hmmm, I think that’s what colloquially known as “misrepresenting”.

David: There could be something wrong with the Lancet article; I’m prepared to hear a case to that effect. Maybe some day someone will make a case that Roberts et al are partisan and dishonest. But there is one participant in these debates who has already demonstrated themselves to be partisan and dishonest. That person is you, David.

See, we’re lost in the weeds now. That is what rational people call rational discussion.

But I’m not a rational person. I’m a liberal fascist! And I say, “Fuck this shit!”

And do I get invited to speak on NPR? No!

Does Jonah Goldberg? Yes!

Because he’s a rational person, and rational people speak rationally on NPR.

You all seem to ignore the uncanny timing of both Lancet study, shortly before US elections. The friendly treatment accorded to the papers (including the expedited review) at a minimum suggests collusion between the authors and the editors, with the intent of influencing the outcome of the elections.

om, go read the comprehensive trashing of your theory over at Deltoid.

phantom US bombing raids

I’m reasonably sure the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II was not in use over Iraq; oh, that wasn’t what you meant?

Maybe this was it:

BAGHDAD, Jan 10 (Reuters) – U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on more than 40 targets on Baghdad’s southern outskirts on Thursday in a major strike on al Qaeda safe havens, the military said in a statement.

The U.S. Air Force dispatched two B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets, aiming at three large target areas in Arab Jabour…

In public health it’s assumed people are opposed to high mortality rates.

oom, I can only assume that you haven’t read the Lancet article. They are obviously written for a medical audience.