LANCET REVISITED….Matt Yglesias makes an obvious point about the controversy swirling around the Lancet study of post-war deaths in Iraq:
If the American and British governments ? or conservative think tanks and media outlets ? genuinely feel that the Hopkins team’s methods were unsound, there’s an obvious solution available to them: Design a method for a different comprehensive study of Iraqi mortality and fund its implementation. This is a sufficiently important question, and sufficiently difficult to pin down precisely, that it would make perfect sense for several different studies to be conducted.
I gather that the cost of the study was actually fairly small, somewhere on the order of $50,000 or so. That’s nothing. So why doesn’t some middle-of-the-roadish institution like Brookings or CSIS do its own study? It seems like something that would be worth a bit of grant money.
