Hypothetical Bias

Walker, Texas Ranger on the economy

Via Gail Collins:

Mike Huckabee’s campaign is a mixture of feelings, which are all on the side of the average working stiff, and policies, which are all on the side of the stock exchange. His sidekick, Chuck Norris, has his own stump speech that seems to blame our economic woes on “sheiks and Arabs” who “come over here, buy millions of dollars of merchandise and take it back to their homeland and don’t pay any taxes on it.”

Chuck Norris also played, as his-bad-self, one of the judges in Dodgeball.

Kristof on opportunity cost

From the NYTimes Select ($) (Iraq and your wallet):

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.”

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child.

“The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia, writes in an updated new study with Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist at Harvard. Their report has just appeared in the Milken Institute Review, as an update on a paper presented earlier this year.

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project.

/.../

My vote would be to spend a chunk of that sum instead fighting malaria, AIDS and maternal mortality, bolstering American schools, and assuring health care for all Americans. We’re spending $380,000 for every extra minute we stay in Iraq, and we can find better ways to spend that money.

And check out the "... nifty Web site, www.aei-brookings.org/iraqcosts, where you can tinker with the underlying assumptions and come up with your own personal estimates."

"Whatever They Guessed At": Bush's View of Estimates of Deaths in Iraq

The British journal, The Lancet, has published a paper which updates the estimate of number of people killed (they estimate more than 600,000) since the start of the Iraq conflict. The researchers claim that their figure, far higher than any previous estimate, was more accurate than the death tolls produced by official Iraqi sources.   Bush is staying the course with his earlier estimate by stating, "I, you know, I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life. 600,000 or whatever they guessed at is just, it's not credible."

The relevant portion of the new conference is below & the complete transcript is found here.

From today's Rose Garden news conference:

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war.

That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure? And do you consider this a credible report?

BUSH: No, I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials.

I do -- I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence.

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- you know, that there's a level of violence that they tolerate.

And it's now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel -- can feel, you know, at peace.

No question it's violent. But this report is one -- they put it out before. It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited.

But I, you know, talk to people like General Casey. And, of course, the Iraqi government put out a statement talking about the report.

QUESTION: So the figure's 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?

BUSH: I, you know, I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life. 600,000 or whatever they guessed at is just, it's not credible. Thank you.

53 Books

From MoDo ($):

Mr. Bush tells journalists he has been reading prodigiously, 53 books so far this year, with three bios of George Washington, two of Lincoln and one of Mao.

I'm putting this in the same category as the North Korean guy's multiple holes in one (or is it hole in ones?).

WBCR 90.3 FM

I'm cleaning out the old-fashioned webpage (http://john-whitehead.net). Here is one entry I can't stand to delete:

In 2003, two student DJs at Beloit College's WBCR 90.3 FM noticed that I shared a name with a libertarian commentator who frequently appeared on their station. My station ID is a subtle jab at the guy.