The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,193

unlikely that today’s wars, however destructive to civilians, could be substantially worse.

Goldstein, Roberts, and Mack traced the meme to a chain of garbled retellings in which different kinds of casualty estimates were mashed up: battle deaths in one era were compared with battle deaths, indirect deaths, injuries, and refugees in another. Mack and Goldstein estimate that civilians suffer around half of the battle deaths in war, and that the ratio varies from war to war but has not increased over time. Indeed, we shall see that it has recently decreased by a substantial margin.

The most widely noted of the recent epidemiological estimates is the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq.68 A team of eight Iraqi health workers went door to door in eighteen regions and asked people about recent deaths in the family. The epidemiologists subtracted the death rate for the years before the 2003 invasion from the death rate for the years after, figuring that the difference could be attributed to the war, and multiplied that proportion by the size of the population of Iraq. This arithmetic suggested that 655,000 more Iraqis died than if the invasion had never taken place. And 92 percent of these excess deaths, the families indicated, were direct battle deaths from gunshots, airstrikes, and car bombs, not indirect deaths from disease or starvation. If so, the standard body counts would be underestimates by a factor of around seven.

Without meticulous criteria for selecting a sample, though, extrapolations to an entire population can be wildly off. A team of statisticians led by Michael Spagat and Neil Johnson found these estimates incredible and discovered that a disproportionate number of the surveyed families lived on major streets and intersections—just the places where bombings and shootings are most likely.69 An improved study conducted by the World Health Organization came up with a figure that was a quarter of the Lancet number, and even that required inflating an original estimate by a fudge factor of 35 percent to compensate for lying, moves, and memory lapses. Their unadjusted figure, around 110,000, is far closer to the battle-death body counts.70

Another team of epidemiologists extrapolated from retrospective surveys of war deaths in thirteen countries to challenge the entire conclusion that battle deaths have declined since the middle of the 20th century.71 Spagat, Mack, and their collaborators have examined them and shown that the estimates are all over the map and are useless for tracking war deaths over time.72

What about the report of 5.4 million deaths (90 percent of them from disease and hunger) in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?73 It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high—probably over a million—cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.74

Amazingly, the HSRP has collected evidence that death rates from disease and hunger have tended to go down, not up, during the wars of the past three decades. 75It may sound like they are saying that war is healthy for children and other living things after all, but that is not their point. Instead, they document that deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years, and that the civil wars of today, which are fought by packs of insurgents in limited regions of a country, have not been destructive enough to reverse the tide. In fact, when medical and food assistance is rushed to a war zone, where it is often administered during humanitarian cease-fires, the progress can accelerate.

How is this possible? Many people are unaware of what UNICEF calls the Child Survival Revolution. (The revolution pertains to adult survival too, though children under five are the most vulnerable population and hence the ones most dramatically helped.) Humanitarian assistance has gotten smarter. Rather than just throwing money at a problem, aid organizations have adapted discoveries