The 50 Trillion Dollar War . . .

. . . making the rounds lately are the economist who put out a book that has inflated the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with the ongoing project of rebuilding Iraq, at 3 Trillion dollars.

Much of the additional 2.2 Trillion in cost over the official estimates comes from little tricks of estimation, speculation and pure 'pulled straight from our asses' guess work.

Two can play at that game. There's a war that's been a bigger failure, and been going on for far longer, and I think I can reasonably estimate this conflict's cost at a cool 50 Trillion (give or take 10).

I'm talking about the combined War on Poverty and War on Drugs, which in effect are the same war, and arose at about the same time. These efforts, begun under Johnson, expanded under Nixon and Ford, unchallenged by Carter, and finally resisted by Reagan, have easily cost this country magnitudes more in terms of human misery, government spending, lost tax revenues, and actual lives, than even the most outlandish estimates of the Iraqi front on the War on Terror.

I don't have a whole book to flesh out the details, but it could be done, easily. The first costs to tally would be the dissolution of families amongst the urban poor. That was a direct result of a government welfare system that perversely encouraged out of wedlock births. The best positive correlation between the outcomes of one generation to the next is having a stable two parent household, and that became a distant memory amongst those most reliant on government handouts in less than a decade of an expanded welfare state. The costs of this one change easily dwarves that of Iraq. Not only do you have the welfare checks, which if they were all adjusted to today's dollars going all the way back to the mid-sixties would be a considerable sum. You also have on the negative side of the ledger, the potential income those children would have earned had a system been in place that encouraged familial stability, academic performance, and an intrinsic desire to contribute to society as a whole. Poverty needn't breed more poverty, but the welfare system as it existed during the 60s and 70s did just that, and the 30 years it took to begin to seriously challenge that pernicious system did tremendous damage.

The War on Drugs started much the same time, for much the same reasons, and had many of the same negative effects. Just focusing on incarceration alone, and you begin to total up some huge numbers. Again, if you borrow the methodology employed in getting to that 3 Trillion number on Iraq, then by also calculating the positive contributions all those prisoners would have made had they not been incarcerated, then you are talking real money.

So why is it so natural for economists of a certain political bent to so easily attack a war they don't like with that sort of methodology, but a couple of wars with a much longer history and much more certain outcomes seems to have avoided coming under the type of analysis they advocate on the War on Terror?

Dubious Conclusion Spun From Slightly Larger Sample . . .

. . . this time a NYT story with the headline "Pregnancy Problems Tied to Caffeine". That's an alarming headline, and suggests a cause for concern, but at the end of the article, they quote a sceptic of the study:

Dr. Li said he and his colleagues had determined that the risk from caffeine was real and could not be explained away by different rates of morning sickness.

Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and epidemiology, at Columbia University Medical Center, had reservations about the study, noting that miscarriage is difficult to study or explain. Dr. Westhoff said most miscarriages resulted from chromosomal abnormalities, and there was no evidence that caffeine could cause those problems.

“Just interviewing women, over half of whom had already had their miscarriage, does not strike me as the best way to get at the real scientific question here,” she said. “But it is an excellent way to scare women.”

She said that smoking, chlamidial infections and increasing maternal age were stronger risk factors for miscarriage, and ones that women could do something about.

“Moderation in all things is still an excellent rule,” Dr. Westhoff said. “I think we tend to go overboard on saying expose your body to zero anything when pregnant. The human race wouldn’t have succeeded if the early pregnancy was so vulnerable to a little bit of anything. We’re more robust than that.”

Nice to see the scepticism within the article, but why the alarming headline then? And when this story gets picked up by CBS Nightly News, and all the various local TV newsers, how much you wanna bet they leave out the scepticism?

So much more fun to freak out people without conclusive evidence.

Dubious Conclusions Spun From Tiny Sample . . .

. . . I should just make that a recurring post title.

Latest dubious conclusion spun from tiny sample:

Using a mobile phone before going to bed can damage your health, according to a major study.

A study of 71 people can't be considered conclusive of anything. I'd like to see the numbers, and I'd also wonder how long the study was, and whether or not they rotated which subjects got the radiation dose, and which didn't to try and factor out the possibility that some of the subjects normally had disturbed sleep.

This sort of stuff bugs me, if there's a real reason to be concerned, then follow up with a serious larger scale study, if this is just wild guesses based on a tiny sample, then don't cite a dubious study in a major news outlet.