(no subject)

[pmb]

Y'know, we could have just given every Iraqi citizen $37 336.58 and we'd still be ahead by 3,000 american lives and 500,000 iraqi lives. A trillion is a very large number. I bet that, for a flat rate of 37k per capita, we could have gotten the entire Iraqi army to overthrow Saddam all on their own.

Or, as an alternate view, you and I and everyone we know in this country has paid or will pay 4,000 dollars each for this useless war.

Comments

[dragonmudd.livejournal.com]

While I agree with your sentiment, the argument is terrible. Spending this money is not the same as sending it to Iraq, and it's not the same as just burning it. Most of that money in one way or another is going back into our economy, whether it's going into supply manufacturing or salaries for the personel or whatever. There is definitely a non-trivial portion that is being 'invested' into Iraq I am sure, but you can't just write off every single dollar that's spent as being a waste.

[drinkywinky.livejournal.com]

I disagree with your sentiment and the argument is also terrible.

PMB's point is that we've dumped a huge amount of money into Iraq, and it could have been spent a hell of a lot better. If we're going to try to figure in money that comes back to the gov't, we should also figure in loan interest and opportunity cost, both in where the money could have been used and where the resources could have been used. I think we could ignore less tangible economic effects, and the number would still be about the same.

I do disagree with the 500k Iraqi deaths. That's over 11k deaths a month, every month since the invasion. I know where the number comes from, but it is too high to believe.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

but it is too high to believe

Why? We had shock and awe, and we radically destabilized their society to the point where they are finding dozens of dead bodies with holes drilled in their necks every day. Morgues are full way past any reasonable point. As far as I know, there's not been any credible critique of their methodology. There was even a This American Life episode ( http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/06/320.html ) about how the number was too high to believe. Subsequent studies seem to have born out the previous one, but everyone just dismisses their results as unbelievable because they differ from expectations so much. But data is data, and their methods seem really sound.

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was annoyed at how dismissive people were of that number. Basically everything I heard was 'that's way too high, it couldn't possibly be true' but pretty much no one presented any evidence or arguments to discredit it.

President Bush even dismissed it saying 'their methods have been widely discredited' and left it at that. Of course as near as I could tell they used the standard method for identifying death rates after large disasters.

It's possible they've overestimated somehow; I remember thinking their estimate for the death rate prior to the war seemed awfully low. But I'm guessing that wouldn't throw their data off by more than a factor of 2 or 3. And even if their estimate was 3 times too high, that's still 200,000 civilians, which is like 4 times the 'official' numbers.

The rate at which that story was buried and ignored was really frustrating to me. There was no actual discussion, people just dismissed it because they didn't want it to be true.

[drinkywinky.livejournal.com]

One time, I went to the doctor and got some test results which essentially said my temperature, heart rate and breathing were fine, but my blood pressure was 0. I don't know enough about the doctor's methodology to know what went wrong, but it's obvious something did because the number is such an outlier.

Same thing here. With 11k deaths/month, the number of injuries should be higher, the morgues should have been overflowing since day 1, and estimates from other sources should not be off by a factor of 10. People should be equally dismissive of any estimate around 5k total.

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

You anology is painfully flawed. You have a great deal of first hand knowledge of your body's temperature, as well as a pretty good method for estimating it. You have NO real information about deaths in Iraq other than ridiculous estimates given by the administration. It's pretty much a given that the administration in underestimating deaths, given they are essentially counting up deaths that get covered in the news.

Also, the methodologies used in the study are the same ones used to arrive at casualty estimates for other disasters. So, to use anology (painfully flawed though it is) if a doctor was testing the temperatures of 10 people in a row, and only your temperature came up as 0, you wouldn't be so quick to discount it. You would at least look into it to determine what was going on. If further test also read your temperature as 0, you'd have to start reconsidering your preconceived notions.

The point is, no one really knew what the casualty rates were. We're all just sitting here watching the news and seeing what they report. But when a study comes out that challenges what we WANT to be true we discount it completely without thought or analysis. By many accounts the morgues have been overflowing and most deaths go unreported. Also, what Peter says is true, bodies are continually being discovered and the administration has said that if they can't determine who killed them, they don't count them in their official body count.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

the horrible part, of course, is the many deaths and far far more injured--the serious injuries actually worry me as much or more than all the deaths, as many of them are permanently disabling injuries, like losing a leg, that would have been death even in Vietnam, but our medicine has gotten better. Yay medicine getting better, yay people not dying, but the death count is misleading if you consider the effect on the US -- tens of thousands of seriously traumatized, possibly psychologically impaired, not being well taken care of, physically highly damaged, veterans.

But then there's the billions of dollars that actually weren't spend on Iraqi infrastructure or American equipment and food, but were simply siphoned off into bank accounts.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

"I do disagree with the 500k Iraqi deaths. That's over 11k deaths a month, every month since the invasion. I know where the number comes from, but it is too high to believe."

It boggles my mind that someone would make such a blatant argument from personal incredulity, especially when the person's own gut feelings are not informed by first-hand knowledge, while they're arguing against British epidemiologists and Iraqi surveyors who personally visited thousands of Iraqi households to interview family members and record death certificates.

Question: Without looking it up, what's the population of Iraq?

If you didn't guess between 25 and 30 million, then you don't even have the most basic information to determine what is or isn't a believable death rate. Iraq is not a small country. It has about 100 major cities and towns. 11,000 deaths is about 100 excess deaths per month in each of these towns. Is that so surprising, when 100 can die in a single day in Baghdad without much comment?

Question: What was the crude death rate in Iraq in the years immediately before the invasion?

Answer: At least 11,000 deaths per month (according to US government and independent academic sources). Hard to believe? Well, that just shows you that your ability to "believe" mortality rates needs adjustment. 11,000 deaths per month in Iraq is an annual death rate of only about 5/1000. The United States has an annual death rate of 8.26/1000. (Countries like the U.S. with aging populations typically have higher crude death rates than countries like Iraq with much younger populations.) Over 200,000 people die per month in the U.S. Do you find that surprising? It doesn't matter. It's true.

This has nothing to do with whether I support the invasion of Iraq. I'm just trying to show that gut feelings are lousy substitutes for empirical data. In response to your other arguments, morgues in some areas are overflowing, and the medical reporting infrastructure has broken down (so even when death certificates are issued locally, as they were for the majority of deaths in the Lancet papers, they are not reported centrally). Comparing an epidemiology survey to "passive" methods that only count reported deaths is silly: In nearly every war and large-scale disaster, passive reporting undercounts deaths by a factor of at least 5. Yes, the Lancet studies should be compared with other, independent studies for confirmation—but you can't compare raw numbers between studies measuring completely different things. (I'm not aware, for instance, of any non-passive study of injuries that measured over the same time period and population of either of the Lancet papers.)

Finally, compare your "belief" in the study to that of someone living in Iraq.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

Most of that money in one way or another is going back into our economy, whether it's going into supply manufacturing or salaries for the personel or whatever.

You seem to be mixing up "money" and "wealth". It is true that the little pieces of paper we give to people to fund the war do not disappear, they get handed to other people and so on in a long chain of transactions. The same would be true if we gave them to Iraqis, since (unless they change their currency), the only thing to do with dollars is to spend them on something in the US. So they come back to our economy regardless.

What does not come back is the time and energy which the little pieces of paper purchase. If we spend a $100B on the war, we are probably commanding roughly $100B worth of goods and services, and directing them towards a certain end. If we had not done this, those same goods and services could have been directed towards another purpose, one with more positive effect on people's happiness.

Manufacturing war supplies takes resources. Those resources would have done other things if not directed toward the war. Don't get confused by accounting gimmickry.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

In addition to the waste of people's time and effort, there's also the probable future waste of potential good, as we racked up enough of a debt that our interest payments are becoming even more noticeable. The longer we keep doing that, the more debt we have, the more we have to pay interest, the less money we could be spending on local programs.

(not to suggest we want to have no debt, just that at a certain point it starts to interfere, and we're getting there, if not already there)

[dragonmudd.livejournal.com]

You misunderstand me. I was trying to argue that spending that wealth on the war effort is more beneficial to our economy than giving the money away to the Iraqi people.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought you said - and I believe that it is wrong. If we give the money to Iraqi's, they will buy American goods with it (what else would they do with dollars?). The result is that the wealth is directed towards giving people American goods, rather than buying bombs and tanks and fueling planes and carriers or whatever it is we do with the money when fighting a war.

In the former case, at the end of the day, people have lots of stereos and Ford pickups and whatever. In the latter case, you've blown up a lot of shit and flown a lot of planes in circles, and maybe stockpiled a bunch more supplies for destroying things. It's no contest.

[dragonmudd.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see what you are saying now. Good point.

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

[Y]ou and I and everyone we know in this country has paid or will pay 4,000 dollars each for this useless war.

Because much of the money will have been borrowed, people who haven't had a chance to vote yet--even be born yet--will be paying for it. Yet, the administration wants more tax cuts. Basically, what they're saying is that we should spread the costs to future generations rather than take the costs on ourselves. I think it makes the whole thing much, much worse.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

That would have been capital flight. The $37k/iraqi was largely spent on American weapons and equipment, which mostly went to American companies, or on Iraqi infrastructure, which also largely went to American companies.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

This is the same error as the bogus worries over the "trade deficit". Unless Iraq switches to a dollar economy, what are they going to do with dollars? They are going to spend them on buying stuff from American suppliers or investing in American companies, or giving them to people who will do those things. Dollars are not capital, they are pieces of paper, and pieces of paper which are only useful in the US. Any pieces of paper we send overseas will get happily sent back, since people would rather use them here to buy goods/investments than have a useless pile of paper at home.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

that's not really that true, as there isn't that much infrastructure in Iraq to allow for that much in the way of purchases, and with all the sanctions and Saddam, there probably wouldn't have been much infrastructure built to do so, so the end result would have just been inflationary, at least in the immediate term, and then deflationary when the infrastructure was built. (there are cases, by the way, of stockpiling of dollars and using them primarily locally as an internal currency, resulting, effectively, in currency flight, albeit minor, though not capital flight).

Which points to the suggestion that giving each iraqi 37k, beyond being logistically about as difficult as the war (though far less bloody for us -- could be as bloody for them, perhaps) wouldn't really have much effect.

(I made no effort to mark it, but my first comment was not particularly serious.)

And there actually is concern about the trade deficit, and it's not bogus. It has to do with macroeconomic factors and currency valuation factors and I'm not sure that we really undrestand it, but a long term trade deficit, for anybody but the US, seems to be linked to problems. The US has managed to avoid that, which might be the theories being wrong, or it might just be Goliath.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

stockpiling dollars - that would be currency flight. But the result would just be a smidgeon of domestic dollar deflation, which is not a bad thing.

It would be logistically difficult to give each Iraqi $37K. But I find it tough to believe it's as difficult as a war. Couldn't we just use the Army as a giant FedEx, and let them use their $37K to order cool shit from American catalogues? Surely that's logistically solvable.

I don't really feel like getting into the trade deficit, but the economists I read in my little echo chamber think it's a bogus concern.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

I think if we gave each Iraqi 37K we'd have to figure out which ones had already gotten it...and keep them from killing each other just after they'd gotten the money...and lots of other logistical difficulties.

Plus, there'd be at least a hundred hour debate in the Senate about what currency to give it to them in...and all sorts of other stuff. =)

As for the trade deficit, this is why I hemmed and hawed about macroeconomic theory, because I'm really not sure that anyone understands macroeconomic theory, or that the correlations they've made hold up beyond the limited examples they found them in. *shrug*

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

This is hardly a useless war! This war has enabled us to definitively label Bush 43 as an incredibly bad american president, and provided myriad specific examples to support this assessment. Why, withouth this war we would be left dithering about faith based social initiatives, no child left behind, stem cell research policies, and the farce of republican fiscal conservativism. No, this war most definitely has a use. Even better, this useful war can be nicely summed up in monetary costs to the american public, at the bargain price of only $4000 each.

:)

[boojum.livejournal.com]

"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."