That's What I Said!

One of the frustrations of blogging in relative obscurity is that sometimes, after I have blogged about a point of view, or an idea, or a way of looking at a set of facts, the mainstream media comes along and runs an article that takes that very point of view. There's no legal wrong (unless, improbably, someone is actively stealing from my blog), just a sense of "Hey, I wrote about that idea eight months ago! I should be writing for [insert name of publication]?"

In these situations, about the best I can do is hope that my readers (all three of you) will appreciate that we here at Laboville are way ahead of the curve. You may now commence basking in smug self-righteousness that you are on the "bleeding edge", as they say.

The latest example of this comes courtesy of Slate Magazine, which has an article about how to accurately compare the war in Iraq with the war in Vietnam. [link] The gist of the article is that advances in medical technology, war-making technology, and the strategy by which we wage war have all improved since Vietnam, so that a straight comparison of casualties and killed-in-action is misleading. To accurately assess the burden on soldiers in Iraq relative to Vietnam, some adjustment is necessary in order to account for those changes. And, not surprisingly, the adjusted statistics are grim and possibly getting worse.

Here's what Slate had to say:

Economists like to quote statistics in "constant dollars," where they factor in historical inflation rates to produce statistics that allow for side-by-side comparison. Warfare is more complex than macroeconomics, but it is possible to produce a similar "apples to apples" comparison for casualties across conflicts. In a recent article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Atul Gawande (a former Slate contributor) concluded that improvements to military medicine since Vietnam have dramatically reduced the rate at which U.S. troops die of wounds sustained in combat.

. . .

Simply, a soldier was nearly 1.5 times more likely to die from his wounds in Vietnam than in Iraq today.

And here's what we had to say in Laboville on March 11, 2004, in a piece entitled "Statistics for People Who Do Like to Think":

These changes in both warfare and medicine got to me to thinking -- what is the relevant comparison when comparing casualties of war? In economics, when prices are compared across a long period of time, the comparisons are often made in "constant dollars" or by using a benchmark currency value (e.g., "in 1980 dollars"). Wouldn't it also be relevant to account for changes over time when talking about the effects of war?

. . .

For example, based on the statistics cited by CBS, we could assume that if we had fought the Vietnam War using todays tactics and technology, the ratio of injured to killed would have been 6:1 instead of 4:1. In other words, we could calculate that 1 out of 3 soldiers who died in Vietnam then might have survived today. Thus, instead of 55,000 dead, the number might have been closer to 36,000 dead.

Conversely, one would need to multiply the number of killed in action in Iraq by 1.5 (6 divided by 4), which would bring us to approximately 840 combat deaths, in constant numbers.

This is not a subject in which I want to gloat about being right. More appropriately, I am glad to know that my initial hunch has been borne out by research, since that suggests that the mainstream media back in March (when CBS ran the numbers that my post was based on) was actually doing some constructive reporting. Nevertheless, I'm saddened that the research was necessary in the first place.

Update -- here is the link to the New England Journal of Medicine article on casualty statistics in Iraq. [link]