Death, Statistics, and Politics

October 13, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s hard to wrap your mind around large numbers, especially when they refer to things you’re not familiar with. I remember when my son was learning about dinosaurs in kindergarten (when did dinosaurs became such an important part of the early curriculum anyway, and why?). I couldn’t really grasp the difference between “165 million years ago” and “65 million years ago,” even though a difference of 100 million years is a long time and even though it made quite a difference for the dinosaurs— a difference between being dominant and being extinct.

A couple of days ago, the British journal The Lancet published a study estimating that 600,00 Iraqis had died from violence since the U.S. invasion three and a half years ago. That works out to 470 deaths a day, every day. The confidence interval was broad, so the low-end estimate was “only” 420,000, a number which still sounds incredibly large. (That confidence interval also means that the upper-limit of 790,000 was as likely as the low-end figure.)

Obviously there are political implications in the Iraqi death rate. Arguments in favor of the war would seem a bit weaker if the blessings of liberty which the US invasion brought to Iraq also included far more violent death than Iraqis suffered under Saddam. Here’s President Bush at a press conference the same day.

QUESTION: A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure? And do you consider this a credible report?

BUSH: “No, I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. . . .But this report is one -- they put it out before. It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited.

QUESTION: So the figure's 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?

BUSH: I, you know, I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life.

Bush is, of course, wrong. The methodology (“cluster sampling”) has not been discredited. Even so, many people find it hard to imagine the 470-a-day figure. Yes, the news carries reports of violent death every day, but the numbers are smaller. Today’s news reports eleven killed at a satellite TV station. Sometimes the numbers are as high as 50. But 470 every day —is that plausible?

Yes. The news rarely reports on the killings outside of Baghdad, and it rarely reports on isolated killings of smaller numbers of people. Baghdad (about violent 100 deaths a day) is the largest city, and it holds 10% of the Iraqi population. But there are many, many other cities; some of them even make the news reports occasionally — Fallujah, Baquba, Ramadi. Blogger Juan Cole notes that the authorities in Basra admitted last may that people there were being assassinated at the rate of one an hour, 24 a day. And none of those deaths was reported in the US news (or any other Western press).

You can’t use news stories to arrive at statistical estimates. That’s why you need science-based techniques like cluster sampling. The results may at first seem hard to imagine —science always has a hard time when it comes up against “common sense”— but it’s also hard to imagine such a thing as “165 million years ago.” Which may be part of the reason that most Americans don't believe in evolution either.

AK-47s -- "Not uncommon"

October 9, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

Another school shooting, this one in Joplin, Missouri. The shooter was a thirteen-year-old Columbine wannabe. Fortunately, the gun jammed after the first shot, which was fired at the ceiling, so the only damage was a burst water pipe.
Living in the Northeast, I sometimes forget what the rest of the country is like. What really struck me was not that it was another school shooting— like most other good Americans, I’ve gotten used to these. It was these sentences from the AP story

The student left, and officers arrested him behind a nearby building. Police described his weapon as a Mac-90, a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle. . . . .
Jones said the gun belonged to the boy's parents. Farmer said it is not uncommon for people in the area to own assault weapons.

Not uncommon! Lots of folks have them. I wonder what they use these military assault rifles for.

It’s also interesting that these latest school shootings have not brought any calls for stricter gun laws. Polls consistently show a majority of Americans in favor of stricter gun controls. But gun laws, especially in the last 15-20 years, have basically been written by the NRA, even though these policies reflect a minority view. Most of the country has come to accept these laws as inevitable and therefore not worth talking about. In the latest spate of shootings, very few, if any, of the news reports on these shootings asked the NRA to defend its position. It’s as though the issue, for better or worse, has been settled and that the availability of very deadly weapons is sort of like the weather, a condition nobody can do anything about.

The CBS news website has a nice interactive map — click on a state and see a brief description of its rules on gun licences, sales, etc., and its rate of firearms deaths. New York and New Jersey have about 5 gun deaths for every 100,000 residents. States in the West and South, with more guns and fewer gun laws, have gun death rates double or in some cases triple that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/04/17/eveningnews/main185126.shtml

Small Town Life

Posted By: Yasemin Besen
It was no "art": I found Friday Night Lights pretty formulaic. However, what I liked about the show was the depiction of small town life. The show takes place in a small Texas town, where high school football is the main activity: not professional, not college: high school football.
Football is a central activity that creates social cohesion in a small community. It's also the source of pride and town identity in a deprived town. Football is the way to relate to others in town, but it's also the way out of it. In small towns, where economic opportunities are limited, the only way for social mobility is through football. While not many benefit from it, it's the ideal that keeps many from questioning the existing economic structure. Focusing on themes like social cohesion, inequality, small town life, rather than following a formula, would have made it much more interesting.

Friday Night Lite

October 4, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

I watched the first episode of “Friday Night Lights,” the new NBC show about high school football in a Texas town. The New York Times critic had given it a rave review, repeating words like “great” and “art.”

 

Art it may have been (the Times critic was especially impressed by the show’s sound editing, an artistic touch that viewers like me aren’t likely to notice, and not the sort of thing to make us want to tune in next week). But great? It was about football, about teenagers playing a football game. As such, it played on one long-standing idea in American movies and TV: all moral questions, all questions of character, can be settled in a contest. Typically, the story sets out some difficulties for the hero —conflicts with the society, conflicts with some other person or organization, conflicts within himself. It all leads up to some climactic confrontation. Usually the hero wins, occasionally he loses. But the outcome doesn’t matter so much as the nobility of the fight, for win or lose, the hero has fought, and that seems to resolve all issues. The classic example is the old Western with its quick-draw shootout, which resolves issues like economic conflicts between ranchers and farmers over land use. But sports and games figure prominently, especially one-on-one contests like boxing. Rocky is the obvious example, but there are lots of other fight films, and many of them have this same quality: the match seems to melt all problems no matter how complicated, no matter how seemingly unrelated to the match itself—problems between a man and a woman, a son and father, friend and friend.

My own list includes movies about everything from airplane dogfights to chess. Some are classics (“The Hustler,” which ends in a pool match, or “On the Waterfront,” which ends in a fistfight between a worker and a union boss), and many are best forgotten (“The Cincinnati Kid,” which ends in a poker game, or “The Karate Kid” and many, many, others).

More recently — and I guess this will be true of “Friday Night Lights”— the hero is not so much an individual as a team, as in all those “coach” movies. But the assumption is the same: getting ready for the big game and then playing it leads to triumph over all internal or external obstacles in life.

Last night’s episode of “Friday Night Lights” clutched at one other American cliche— the Hollywood Ending. The team is down by ten points with three minutes left; their star quarterback is taken off the field on a stretcher, possibly paralyzed for life with a spinal injury; the substitute quarterback muffs play after play. At this point, I turned to my son, who was watching too, and said, “If they win this game . . .” Guess what. No, you don’t even have to guess. You know. You’ve seen so many American movies that you know what happens.

Again I am reminded of what the Iranian immigrant in “The House of Sand and Fog” says (see the Sept. 27 entry in this blog) — Americans always wanting the sweet taste.