Worst. Article. Ever.

"Well, I haven't done an exhaustive study. But this article on counting casualties in Iraq is embarassingly bad, even by the standards of cursory reprints of press releases. As it happens, I've been writing about casualty counts in Iraq (so I'm afraid you're going to be hearing much more about this over the next month or so), and I'm flabbergasted by its bizarre omissions. I don't think that any credible person who has spent any time on the debate would be satisfied with this particular attempt to deal with it.

For starters, it repeats nearly uncritically the results of a survey from ORB which purports to find a million casualties in Iraq. Pretty much everyone I've spoken to regards their numbers--which utilize a murky methodology on a very small sample, and then publish bizarrely tiny uncertainty estimates on a survey in a bloody war zone--as a bit of silliness. It fails to mention that the largest survey using the best regarded methodology, which was just released by the WHO earlier this month, found about a tenth as many deaths."
Megan McArdle

H/T Jason

Great comments on this post.