Speaking of war and death and other cheery topics, here’s a helpful analysis of the results of the recent Lancet study on the mortality rate in post-invasion Iraq (via Confessing Evangelical).
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal
One response to “Damn statistics”
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I guess I’m not convinced by the “Don’t focus on the 655,000, look at what the results from the sample mean” line of argument. Surely the total estimate is an important thing–if it seems radically out of kilter with not just the “official” line but with what we can make any sense of, then it argues toward the invalidity of the sample as representative (which doesn’t minimize in the least that violence which is clearly ongoing).
That is, if this sample is representative we must believe that somewhere around 90,000 people have actually died from suicide bombings in Iraq in the last 3 years. If that number appears inconceivably high (and it does–unlike anonymous murders by gunshot or other kinds of violence that news and government and military folks might not pick up on, suicide bombings always attract attention), then there may be a problem.
So I can’t put any stock in these numbers–I can’t reconcile them not with any official line, but with things I know to be the case. If these numbers are right, then that suggests Baghdad may have experienced somehting along the lines of a 25% casualty rate (assuming people are wounded at approximately 3x the rate they’re killed) and ought to be an utter ghost town today. Nobody but the most committed fighters would stick around under those conditons. But that’s not the Baghdad we have–instead, it’s still a very large, very crowded, extremely violent city.
There are still plenty of horrible and 100% accurate places to look if one wants to see the scope of the violence in Iraq. I don’t think we need bad statistics to do that job for us.
A Thinking Reed 
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