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Updated numbers on violent deaths in Iraq
I've cited the Lancet numbers myself (in qualified fashion), but maybe the estimate of a million Iraqi deaths is far too high:
A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country...For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted..."Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva. "What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating to get information from other sources."
Here is more, here is the study itself. This new estimate is probably not the final word, but you will recall that anyone who questioned the older Lancet estimate was pilloried at length; there is a lesson here - Thy Shall Not Use Thy Blog to Squelch Heretics -- and I am curious to see who will offer mea culpa and who will not. "The two estimates aren't as different as they look" is one way of spinning it; "I was wrong" is another.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 10, 2008 at 07:51 AM in Data Source | Permalink
Comments
I wonder if these new figures will get much press, other than blogs. I also find it strange that there are no comments. Anybody out there?
Posted by: macquechoux at Jan 10, 2008 8:19:26 AM
The . It also reports the correct estimate for the original study - 600,000, not "one million".
It may be worth noting that this new study apparently only counts "civilian" deaths, while the Lancet study, iirc, counted all deaths, whether civilian, military or insurgent. The Iraqi ministry of health has also revised its pre-war estimates of death rates for this study, which obviously makes a big difference.
The Guardian quotes one of the authors of the original study, who is supportive even though he claims "overwhelming evidence" the study new study's estimates are too low (it doesn't go into what this evidence might be). He also says the studies' findings are actually less different than they appear - a doubling as opposed to a tripling of death rates, accodring to the Guardian.
It should be noted, the Iraqi government was apparently previously relying on IBC figures of around 40,000, so this increases their estimate by over three times. (The British government tends to refer to IBC figures too; I don't know about the US.)
Posted by: Tim at Jan 10, 2008 8:46:59 AM
My prior was that the Lancet studies were shocking and hard to believe but the best estimate available. This new information should lead to revised priors. In search for the discrepancy between the Lancet studies and this questions will include why the pre-war mortality rate is so different, and whether this implies under/over-reporting in the NEJM/Lancet study/ies.
But:
What is the estimate of one million deaths? (Neither of the John Hopkins / Bloomberg studies report this.)
Also, I would be interested to have spelled out the lesson you refer to is? My impression is that the article you link to is a mostly entirely valid criticism of sundry obvious statistical fallacies committed by people refusing to review their priors even when intellectually unable to provide a reason for their stance. It could only have raised the standard of debate. And it does not refer to Megan McArdle (who would not be silly enough to make those mistakes), nor to the arguments she made.
Meanwhile, innumerate criticism of the John Hopkins / Bloomberg study is alive and well; here's the latest National Journal version: http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm. No wonder Deltoid and others have been kept busy.
Posted by: per at Jan 10, 2008 8:47:08 AM
So Fred Kaplan was "pilloried" by Daniel Davies, was he? Anyone got a picture of poor Fred in the stocks?
Posted by: Kevin Donoghue at Jan 10, 2008 9:13:13 AM
There are still two points that aren't much changed by the numbers:
(1) Nobody should be comforted by "only" 150k deaths.
(2) There is responsibility, and then there is blame; the difference is more than just semantics. Responsibility falls to the US for security, but blame falls to the murderers who actually did the killing. If anything, the higher casualty figures were an argument for more troops, not less.
Posted by: Independent George at Jan 10, 2008 9:19:45 AM
"but the best estimate available": it's a dangerous game to accept any old rubbish as an estimate rather than to say "there is no worthwhile estimate available". I'm also struck by the tedious debates about statistical validity - all statistical analyses depend on key assumptions of trust (did they actually do what they claimed?) and representativeness (were the samples, assuming they really existed, representative of the population?). Fiddling about with technical details when you are unable to answer these two questions satisfactorily is pretty feeble stuff.
Posted by: dearieme at Jan 10, 2008 9:31:57 AM
dearime: yes, of course; if one is happy to dismiss as fraud any study whose findings do not conform with one's priors one can learn nothing new. That, too, may be called a dangerous game.
Posted by: per at Jan 10, 2008 10:21:53 AM
Well said dearime! People are all-too prone to accept 'confidence intervals' around an estimate as a measure of how confident we should be that something is true.
But statistics is mostly summary - and summarized garbage is still garbage.
Above quite a small sample size, the representativeness of a sample is vastly more important than the size of a sample - that was the message of the famous 1936 Presidential election Gallup poll story - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gallup
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Jan 10, 2008 10:35:59 AM
So only 150,000 Iraqis died. And here I was thinking the war was unjustified. My bad. Obviously it was an even-handed reponse to the deaths of 3000 New Yorkers
Posted by: Joe at Jan 10, 2008 11:23:41 AM
(((snip))) "Two of the study's co-authors told the National Journal that they opposed the war and submitted their findings to Lancet with the insistence that it appear before the election.
Much of the data for the study, which was organized by Johns Hopkins University, was collected by Iraqi researcher Riyadh Lafta, who once worked for Saddam, the Nat. Journal
said." (((snip)))
All you need to know...
Cheers
JR
Posted by: JR at Jan 10, 2008 11:25:06 AM
One obvious potential bias is that victimized groups are far more likely to have fled the country, and therefore were not surveyed. Since millions reputedly fled their homes, this is not a trivial problem. I wonder how they addressed it?
Posted by: steve at Jan 10, 2008 11:26:35 AM
Dear JP,
"All you need to know..." is a poor conclusion.
For one, you are making the weak guilt by association fallacy.
Secondly, please identify which government researchers in pre-US Invasion Iraq -didn't- work for Saddam.
Thirdly, describe the relationship and degree of closeness to Saddam and his cult of personality that Lafta enjoyed.
Fourthly, describe Lafta's degree of political and philosophical devotion to Baathism.
As it is, your conclusion that Lafta's work is unreliable because of a preported relationship to Saddam is very weak. As with any good science, examine the method and try to reproduce the results following that same method in order to validate the results.
Posted by: Not All at Jan 10, 2008 11:50:29 AM
Dearest "Not all,"
Credibility is an absolute when presenting such a study. Those two issues I touched on destroy any possible credibility. I didn't even have to point out that the funding for the Lancet report came from George Soros.
Good grief...you can't possibly be defending the original numbers. Right?
Cheers,
JR
Posted by: JR at Jan 10, 2008 12:05:53 PM
The estimate of 1 to 1.2 million deaths was NOT given by any study or researcher, so far as I remember. It was a very rough extrapolation from the end date of one of the Lancet studies to the present time, and it roughly matched an extrapolation from another and separate determination of Iraqi death rates.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Jan 10, 2008 12:08:14 PM
Tyler, I don't see how this study means defenders of the Lancet study owe anyone an apology. Either the Lancet critics had sound objections about the methodology of the Lancet study, in which case they were always owed an apology, or they were making unsound objections and are still not owed an apology. I don't believe anyone's argument turned on what a future study would show.
Posted by: washerdreyer at Jan 10, 2008 12:38:09 PM
"So only 150,000 Iraqis died. And here I was thinking the war was unjustified. My bad. Obviously it was an even-handed reponse to the deaths of 3000 New Yorkers"
Is there really people, who are stupid enough to believe stuff like this? Do these people believe that the US Marines went from house to house to kill civilians? Do they not understand, that the majority of these victims were killed by the same people who attacked the WTC? Why are so many people so fricking retarded?
Posted by: Sven at Jan 10, 2008 12:58:48 PM
Do they not understand, that the majority of these victims were killed by the same people who attacked the WTC?
This would seem to be a new revelation.
Posted by: shecky at Jan 10, 2008 1:04:53 PM
It is interesting to contrast the reasonable tone of Megan's original post with the vehement response then and some of the agitated posters here who still want to cling to the Lancet study. The Lancet study made a splash because it was a big number. The impact would have been much less had the number been 150,000. Futhermore, the death rate must be much lower now after the success of Petraeus' strategy.
Posted by: Rich Berger at Jan 10, 2008 1:15:00 PM
Obviously, this hasn't gotten much press play- this is the first I have read of it.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Jan 10, 2008 1:34:29 PM
Thou shalt not use thy...
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Posted by: anotherlmrr at Jan 10, 2008 2:14:17 PM
Thou shalt not use thy...
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Posted by: anotherlmrr at Jan 10, 2008 2:14:40 PM
I do wonder what the impact would have been had this study come out first.
Arguably, the Lancet study has pushed the Iraqi government towards doing this study - which was one of the hopes of the authors.
Can we move past the methodological issues distinguishing the studies to other things? In particularly, how do we interpret this kind of loss of life, how does it make us feel. The British government has been pushing the IBC figure of 40,000 deaths; if they now accept this official Iraqi figure, does it change anything? Is there anything they, or others would do differently if they believe (or are forced to admit) more than three times as many people have died as they previously estimated? Is there any kind of economic calculus going on - say, a relation between how much pro-occupation people are willing to spend in Iraq and the severity of Iraqi casualties?
What does it change if we accept the Lancet figures? Do we have (as Stalin would say) a threshold after which more deaths become effectively meaningless to us? I wonder whether this is the case, whether precise figures only become useful later, when we're comparing the scale of historical events.
I don't imagine this study will make much news, because it's not particularly useful as propaganda for any political position, and for those interested in the truth, that means getting into questions of statistical and epidemiological methodology. Which is not something the media are very interested in (because generally, neither is anyone else).
Posted by: Tim at Jan 10, 2008 2:18:37 PM
Curious why apparently in this crowd the following two assertions are made:
1. The study that says *all* fatalities (including disease, poor medical care, etc.) are high must be wrong.
2. The study that says that all *violence* caused fatalities are lower must be right.
Why aren't the same doubts applied to the 1st, not applied to the second? Since the studies measure two different quantities, it's possible that both are correct.
I don't know what the correct answer to the number of *total* fatalities is, but when I draw the conclusion that the civilian toll in civil war(s) is usually high, I don't derive it from political priors, I derive it from history. The Lancet study is certainly consistent with history. The new study may indicate the actual toll was mercifully less. But the idea that the war is a most excellent adventure because it *only* directly kills 50,000 people per year (for the economists: at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars per year) is ah, wrong.
Posted by: Russell L. Carter at Jan 10, 2008 2:34:02 PM
As I blogged in 2006, the Lancet study total number of deaths was probably overestimated because Iraq is too dangerous a place to have carried out the study in the random fashion that was claimed:
"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. [It would account for the very large number of interviews per day and the high proportion of interviewees with death certificates of their loved ones.]
"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."
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-study-150000-violent-deaths-in-iraq.html
By the way, I estimate that American troops have been firing 275,000 rounds of ammunition per day in combat.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 10, 2008 3:11:56 PM
By the way, this estimate of 151,000 violent deaths was only for the first 3.0 years of this 4.8 year long (and counting) war. The first year of the war was pretty peaceful, so the total violent deaths under this methodology should be approaching a quarter of a million by now.
And then there is the big increase in nonviolent deaths reported in this latest study.
But it's all worth it because we've made Iraq safe for Iranian influence!
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 10, 2008 3:31:28 PM
