Economist Brad DeLong on the Lancet Study (600,000 Iraqi dead)

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/55_deaths_per_y.html

The Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. 47 neighborhoods. 1849 households. Among those households, 55 deaths per year (2 from violence) before the invasion. Among those households, 168 deaths per year (92 from violence) since the invasion. Scale up those sampling results to a population of 5 million households, and you have your 600,000 direct and indirect civilian casualties of war number.

The press coverage is, I think, unsatisfactory.

My ire was provoked by seeing the--usually very thoughtful--William Arkin of the Washington Post being what seemed to me overly suspicious of the Lancet study.

. . .

Meanwhile, Daniel Davies aggressively defends the study:

Comment is free: The numbers do add up: The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse.... The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals.... The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported....

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3....

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http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/55_deaths_per_y.html

and as simple as that is for me to comprehend there will never be anyone on TV seeing it that way.

:(

However, I believe the Lancet is a peer reviewed journal. I would so much rather see a flaw exposed in the study now, rather than in the future. Dan Rather all over again! BTW, my stats professor said, on first read, that it looked sound and he was just waiting to get his hands on the Journal rather than the pdf file that received wide distribution.

That's one of the reasons W's "flawed" statement was so silly. He wouldn't know the difference between a peer-reviewed study done with acceptable methodology from one of the internet polls at a partisan site.

first he accused the researchers of "guessing" at the number. Second who here believes he even read it? I mean really???

and the way they are being dismissed is frightening. 600,000 human beings have been slaughtered - for what? For Bushco to control Iraqi oil, and outside of academia we cannot have an objective discussion in the media. What the fuck is wrong with this planet.

Thank you Brad Delong.

via Majikthise, which blog has been excellent on tracking this.

Interview with Les Roberts, co-author of Lancet study on post-invasion Iraqi deaths

LES ROBERTS: Sure, we, as you said, went to about 50 neighborhoods spread around Iraq that were picked at random, and each time we went, we knocked on 40 doors and asked people, “Who lived here on the first of January, 2002?” and “Who lived here today?” And we asked, “Had anyone been born or died in between?” And on those occasions, when people said someone die, we said, “Well, how did they die?” And we sort of wrote down the details: when, how old they were, what was the cause of death. And when it was violence, we asked, “Well, who did the killing? How exactly did it happen? What kind of weapon was used?” And at the end of the interview, when no one knew this was coming, we asked most of the time for a death certificate. And 92% of the time, people walked back into their houses and could produce a death certificate. So we are quite sure people didn’t make this up.

And our conclusion was comparing the death rate for that 14 months before the invasion, with the 40 months after, that the death rate is now about four times higher. And, in fact, it’s twice as high as when we last spoke two years ago and when we did our first study. So, things have gotten bad, as you stated. We think about 650,000 extra people have died because of this invasion, and about 600,000, some 90%, are from violence.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’m sure you have heard by now the responses of President Bush and military leaders about this. What is your response to their saying that this is not credible?

LES ROBERTS: You know, I don't want to sort of stoop to that level and start saying general slurs, but I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of . It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.

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likes it or not. It will become accepted fact. This study will be a primary source. And because of information like this Bush will become a hated historical boogyman.