Daniel Davies, that fat Welsh stockbroker who predicted this mess, offers another, more pointed analogy and uses math to turn “common sense” on its head:

In the worst year in Northern Ireland, 1972, 496 people were killed in acts of violence related to the Troubles. If we scale that up for the difference in population between Iraq and Northern Ireland (27m/1.5m = 18x) and for the time covered by the Lancet study (39 months/12m = 3.25x), then we can say that, if the situation in Iraq since the invasion had been exactly as bad as the worst year in Northern Ireland, then there would have been 29,016 deaths by violence. Almost certainly coincidentally, this is the lowball number that George Bush gave when initially trying to rubbish the Lancet study. It does not, to be honest, seem very credible.

And another:

Jamaica had 1476 murders in 2005, out of a population of 2.7m. Scaled up in the same way, this gives a number almost exactly equal to the Iraq Body Count “high” estimate. Safe European Home = Rock the Casbah?

Hey, we’re all on the same side here, ultimately…if 650,000 have died or 150,000, it’s much, much worse than I hoped at the end of major combat, and though I think most of those deaths (at least post-2004) have been at the hands of terrorists/’insurgents’/fanatics, we should have never allowed the security situation to spiral so out of control…

As far as the numeracy goes…believe it or not, I have a passion for math…I love reading ‘general reader’ books that focus on the subject (right now, in fact, I’m reading Newman’s 4-volume World of Mathematics and another book from Oxford University Press called Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty – I tend to read about eight books at a time, because I have so many that I can’t stay focused on one).

My problem? Although fairly accomplished in high school, I didn’t pursue it in college, only took the easiest math I could take to get my credit hours (my degree is in Economics, not Econometrics), and as a result have only an easily-confused layman’s apprehension of many of the topics…

Alright, I apologize for my ad hominem rudeness. This is an emotional issue for me, as I’m sure it is for you. And snark is my nature. But I shouldn’t have gone down that path.

What really grates me is not innumeracy or the criticism of the report as much as blithely dismissing it with little more than a wave of the “common sense” hand. And if one doesn’t believe they have the expertise to evaluate the study’s claims, wouldn’t that also warn against accepting Moore’s response at face value? I’m not trying to claim the Lancet report or any other like it is sacrosanct; but, goddamit it, it should be engaged on the merits.

One doesn’t have to be a “expert” in probability theory to see Moore’s core argument as bunkum (I’m not a professional, by the way, if that wasn’t already apparent). It goes against the most fundamental concept in statistics, if not math in general, and could be answered with a five-second Google search. It took Andrew Gelman in the comments to the post I cited one sentence to blow Moores’ entire editorial out of the water: “The total population of the country is essentially irrelevant for the sample size needed. This is a basic statistical principle (it’s the sample size (n) that matters, not the population size (N)).”

That such 2+2=5 nonsense is taken seriously for even a second – what Frankfurtians refer to as “bullsh**” – is what gets us “reality-based” nutrooters’ panties in a bundle.

I addressed b) briefly above. I’ll provide a big, complicated answer about just how accurate the census figures are if you want, but it probably wouldn’t be of much use to the discussion here. For now I’ll limit it to this: A census, unlike the IBC tally and counting death certificates, is a form of active sampling. It is systematic, seeking out people to count, and includes statistical methodologies to account for those it misses. It can also be compared to other regular statistical estimates by the UN, NGOs and other governments to judge accuracy. The IBC and “CDC” counts aren’t wildly off base just because there’s a war on (or, as the IBC people are claiming, implied fraud and incompetence). It’s because those are inherently poor methods of counting. What’s more, we can never really know how much inaccuracy should be attributed to the war, fraud, inertia or whatever, because of the passive, unsystematic nature of the count.

Anyway, from what I’ve read there are indeed some doubts about Iraqi census figures that could impact the Lancet range (by about 75,000, as noted above). This was and is part of the peer review process. From what I’ve seen, the number used in Lancet was statistically reasonable and defenseable.

Let me also say that I don’t believe that accepting the Lancet range as accurate, if not precise, is necessarily “anti-war.” I think one could just as easily argue that the US effort should be redoubled to stop the carnage and prevent it from sliding into complete chaos. I don’t happen to agree that that is possible, but that’s a different argument. In any case, the report is a wake-up call, and must be grappled with.

Jacques, I actually don’t put too much credence in breakdowns of causes of death beyond something like “most people were killed by gunshot, with explosions being the second largest factor” where this study is concerned. There’s the misidentification issue, but an even bigger challenge is trying to parse ever smaller subsets of the original sample, which really are statistically insignificant.

You’re absolutely right about the statistical significance issue. The percentage killed by air strikes could be 5%; it could be 20%. We’d be hard-pressed to tell from the data.

My only point was that, in the case of air strikes, we have an independent way to guestimate the number killed. And that number is substantial. If it’s true that air strikes are responsible for a relatively small percentage of total deaths (even if we don’t know precisely how small) then we get a guestimate of the total number of deaths that is, at least, in the right ballpark of the Lancet figure.

This isn’t an argument about the validity of the Lancet study; it’s a response to those who would say that the Lancet number is absurd on its face. The Lancet number could be right, it could be wrong, but it’s not absurd on its face.

too many steves, it’s an important concern, but I think you’re reading from the wrong end of the equation. The study raises big questions about the state of the Iraqi health system, not the other way around.

But more to your point, the the fog of war isn’t the primary reason people haven’t noticed the magnitude of death (again, people have obviously noticed it in their own families and neighborhoods). It’s because it is not possible to accurately measure the magnitude on a national scale without active sampling and statistical analysis. If the system for centrally collecting and recording death certificates was working reasonably well, the numbers would be closer to the Lancet range, but they still wouldn’t be accurate. That’s just the nature of the beast with matters of this scale. The numbers you and I take for granted about death in the United States were generated by mortality studies, not by simply counting death certificates.

The real question to my mind is: Why aren’t mortality surveys being done in Iraq as a matter of course? “This American Life” did an amazing show on this question last year.

BTW, I’m not claiming it’s impossible that the Lancet study is fundamentally flawed. But the methodology is rock solid and is there for anyone to see. As others have noted, that only way the estimate range could be wildly off is systematic fraud on the part of everyone involved. And there’s zero evidence for that. In fact, the authors have been practically begging governments, media and NCOs to conduct their own studies for comparison.

Death certificates are issued by doctors, not by some government office. They are supposed to be filed with the government but, in Iraq, the system for doing so has completely broken down.

If you ask Iraqi officials how many people have died (and they have been asked), they will tell you that they have no clue as to the number.

Since the Iraqi government is not collecting statistics, the only thing you have to rely on are press reports. If I asked Mark to estimate (based on press reports) how many people died in traffic accidents in Austin in the past 3 years, I think he would have a hard time coming up with an accurate number. And that’s despite the fact that conditions for reporters are infinitely better in Austin than in Ramadi.