LancetIraq
tlambert | March 22, 2005 Andy S, last seen criticizing the Lancet study without reading it, has now read it. Sort of. He writes:
Of Iraq's 18 provinces only 12 were actually visited. ... Now clusters assigned to the unsurveyed provinces were replaced in the sample by selecting clusters in adjacent provinces as proxies. The net effect of this is that of the five provinces in northern Iraq only Ninawa and Sulaymaniya were surveyed. ...In a similar manner Iraq's three southernmost provinces were left unsurveyed.
Somehow or other the Northern Kurdish population and the Southern Shiite population were undersampled…
tlambert | March 20, 2005 If you haven't read my previous forty posts on the Lancet study, here is a handy index. All right, let's go.
First up, via Glenn Reynolds we have Andy S, who critiques the Lancet study despite not having read the thing. This is not a good idea, especially since he is relying on Kaplan's flawed Slate article. Andy has three comments:
Firstly the use of a scientific publication to make POLITICAL POINTS is reprehensible. This Lancet study was published just before the American Presidential Election and was clearly an attempt to make President Bush look bad just before he faced the…
tlambert | March 15, 2005 Apparently the Lancet report is so disturbing to some pro-war folks that they are now denying its very existence. Here's Tim Blair, listing stories that he believes progressives have invented:
Poor progressives. All they have is Lancet reports, Ayad Allawi killing people, the menace of depleted uranium, plastic turkeys, oil pipelines in Afghanistan, Jewish media conspiracies, another Stalingrad in Baghdad, Bush's dumbness, harsh Afghan winters, the massive influence of Jeff Gannon, and looted Iraqi museums. They never get to invent any stories at all.
I sent him a copy of the report in the…
tlambert | March 12, 2005 A large group of public health experts has criticized the coalition for their continuing failure to count the civilian casualties in Iraq. In an editorial in the British Medical Journal Klim McPherson writes:
Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed---the allied invasion of Iraq---was justified largely on grounds of democratic supremacy. Voters in the countries that initiated the war, and others---not least in Iraq itself---are denied a reliable evaluation of a key indicator of the success of that policy. This is unacceptable.
Instead the UK…
tlambert | March 2, 2005 By considering bogus criticisms of the Lancet study it is possible to gain an appreciation of the concept of the infinite. No matter how many you've seen, someone can always come up with a new one. I give you Rob, who writes:
In an attempt at firmer confirmation, the interviewers asked for death certificates in 78 households and were provided them 63 times.
So out of 7,000+ people questioned they only asked for proof in 78 instances? And only received proof in 63 percent of those instances? Seems like they should have been taking better care to…
tlambert | February 25, 2005R.J. Rummel has a response to my earlier post on the Lancet study. Unfortunately he still does not understand what the researchers did.
In his original post Rummel claimed the pre-invasion statistics came from Saddam's Ministry of Health. In fact, they come from the survey the researchers conducted. Despite my explanation, Rummel now argues:
However, then there is Figure 1, which is unreadable except for its description that lists the data as crude mortality per year before and after invasion. For the before, I can only guess that the Ministry…
tlambert | February 24, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars has updated his post attacking the Lancet study with a response to my post. He admits error on one point, but on the rest he has the nerve to accuse me of bringing biases rather than facts to the debate. To see who is bringing facts and who is bringing biases let's look at one of the points he contests:
King originally claimed (my emphasis):
They also chose both to change their list of randomly sampled areas so they didn't have to drive as much; this meant they stayed close to Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, probably oversampling high-…
tlambert | February 24, 2005In today's Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine has a go at the Lancet study, writing
The British medical journal The Lancet published a paper last October (timed deliberately, its authors admit, before the US presidential election), estimating that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected if the war had not happened. Since then, this figure is constantly, unquestioningly cited as an article of faith.
And yet the research has been criticised enough by credible people to have doubt cast on what is, after all, only an estimate based on…
tlambert | February 20, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars has had another go at the Lancet study. King writes:
Many of Saddam's dead were not murdered in the presence of witnesses; there is no indication that the authors of the study charged Saddam with a death for a missing person.
It doesn't matter whether the death was witnessed or not, if the family concluded the the person was dead it was recorded. Missing people are missing and not necessarily dead. And of course people go missing after the invasion as well.
It was noted in the IHT that the authors sought death certificates to verify…
tlambert | February 19, 2005 King at SCSU Scholars demonstrates that he doesn't understand what the Lancet study did:
The point is that the cost of U.S. intervention isn't the total loss of life since March 2003 but the difference between what we know has been lost lives since then and what would have been lost had Saddam Hussein stayed in power. (Economists would call this, indelicately, the "marginal cost".) If that marginal cost is negative, then we would argue perhaps that the intervention was a net benefit.
But that is what the study measured: the change in the death rate. If…
tlambert | February 18, 2005 Via Suki Lombard I discover that the Australian government's position on Iraqi deaths because of the war is that the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths is an exaggeration and we have no idea how many have died and no plans to find out. Govt seeking no information on civilian toll in Iraq war:
PETER VARGHESE: I can't give you a number, no.
JOHN FAULKNER: You can't even hazard a guess?
PETER VARGHESE: Well I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. I mean, that's the whole point.
JOHN FAULKNER: You've got no idea? And no one's made...
PETER VARGHESE: I cannot give…
tlambert | February 12, 2005You would think that after all this time, all possible erroneous arguments against the Lancet study would have been made, but folks keep coming up with new ones. R.J. Rummel has come up with some new ones. Unlike many of the critics, Rummel has read the study; but unfortunately he has badly misunderstood it. Rummel writes:
The pre-invasion statistics were compiled by Saddam's Ministry of Health. There are questions one must ask of such a source that the Lancet researchers do inadequately. Did the ministry include murders or massacres by the Iraqi regime, such as in prison…
tlambert | February 1, 2005 Sagenz has joined the very small and select group of critics of the Lancet study with the honesty to recant and withdraw their criticism.
Chris Young has written a letter to Slate's Fred Kaplan, suggesting that Kaplan correct his flawed critique of the Lancetstudy.
David Adesnik has posted his thoughts on the study. Unlike most of the war supporters who have written about the study he has the intellectual honesty to accept the unanimous verdict of the experts in sampling---that the methodology was sound. Nonetheless, he thinks it is most likely that the result…
tlambert | January 28, 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article on the Lancet study and the way it was ignored in the American news media.
Daniel Davies notes that the blogs have just as bad:
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the media; in the immediate aftermath of the report, half-assed attempts to rubbish the survey, or links to same. Then, when this didn't work, just pretend that it's all been dealt with and move on. Maybe say "I'll get back to you on that" and never do. After a few months of…
tlambert | January 20, 2005The target of one of Tim Blair's five-minute hates on Wednesday was fellow journalist Peter FitzSimons. FitzSimons' crime? He said there had been an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Now you could quibble that the Lancet study measured all excess deaths rather than just civilian ones though since the vast majority were civilian deaths, this isn't that big a deal. Blair, however, calls FitzSimon's "stupid" and links to Andrew Bolt's train-wreck of a critique. I suppose that Bolt's isn't the worst of the critiques out there, but with Fumento around the competition is very very stiff…
tlambert | January 17, 2005 After Fumento promised me:
Now I am going to do the worst possible thing you can do to somebody who measures his life by "hits." I'm not going to write to you again,
what do I find in my inbox from Michael Fumento?
Goodness! Even on the Web you're a pitiful pissant!
I just went to www.alexa.com and ranked your site. Not even in the top million! I don't even have a blog and I'm under 300,000. You have GOT to start training some monkeys to click on your site all day long. That or simply reconcile yourself to reality and save yourself some IP fees by simply writing in a paper…
tlambert | January 8, 2005 Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode:
How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face with a garden rake not once, not twice, but NINE TIMES?!? If ever there was a gag genius in its repetitive stupidity (progressing from funny to not so funny to the funniest thing ever), this is it---merely the sharpest cut in an entire episode that just plain kills.
The award…
tlambert | December 14, 2004 The biggest limitation of the Lancet study is the small sample size. We can be reasonably confident that deaths have increased in Iraq since the invasion, but the 100,000 estimate is a very rough one. The sample from Falluja found an alarming number of deaths from air strikes, but since it was only one sample it is hard to guess how many others have died in similar ways. Fortunately, it is easy to address both these limitations. For the cost of running the Iraq war for about two minutes it would be possible to do a survey with four times the…
tlambert | December 8, 2004 Mike Harwood asked Les Roberts about the breakdown of the violent deaths. Roberts' reply:
Yes, all 12 non-coalition violent deaths happened outside of Falluja. (1 Kut, 1 Thiqar, 1 Karbala, 7 Baghdad, 1 Diala, 1 Missan, Note Baghdad is about 3-7 times greater in population than these other Governorates so the rates are not so different)
Bombing deaths:
Thiqar
M5, M2, F22 (one family)
Thiqar (different village)
M27
Missan
1mo. & 6mo. in same households (often there are multiple sons with wives under the same roof --- interviewer did not record the gender of the…
tlambert | December 3, 2004 Daniel Davies takes apart another bogus critique of the Lancet study, this one from the British Foreign Office that relies on comparing apples to oranges. Michael Lewis at Iraq Analysis has a more detailed rebuttal.
Remarkably, Tech Central Station has published an article by Iain Murray, who acknowledges that
The study itself is actually much more statistically sound than many commentators (including some in these pages) have suggested, and it certainly suggests that the mortality rate is worse in the unstable insurgency-ridden Iraq after the ouster of…