Haitian death tolls (3)

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The Haitian earthquake was a week ago, and while secondary effects of the earthquake (civil unrest, impact of breakdown of infrastructure, etc.) are starting to make the news, the death toll numbers are still all over the place:

• Haiti death toll: Government says toll could be massive, but firm numbers elusive (Christian Science Monitor)
  
• Haiti appeals for aid; official fears 100,000 dead after earthquake (CNN)

The first article mentions the difficulty of getting accurate counts, and notes that while estimates are 50 000 and 100 000, the confirmed count is "in the hundreds" whatever that means. The second article mentions three estimates: 30 000, 50 000, and 100 000, with the two lower numbers coming from a United Nations official rather than Haitian officials.

The first article includes two examples of death tolls vs. their initial estimates, one from a somewhat similar disaster: the 2003 Bam, Iran earthquake. That earthquake was magnitude 6.6, had initial death toll estimates of 41 000, but was eventually revised down to 26 271 killed, 30 000 injured, 100 000 displaced due to high building collapse rates in the Bam metropolitan area. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was much larger, with something like a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and deaths in 14 countries, but most of the deaths were due to the tsunami, so it's hard to make a fair comparison here.

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• Haiti Death Toll Could Be Massive (themoderatevoice.com)

Haitian death tolls

Here are a few quick links regarding the death toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti:

• Kiwi missionary estimates death toll could be 1 million 
• Red Cross: Haiti death toll near 50K; aid begins arriving 
• Haiti death toll in thousands
• 2010 Haiti earthquake (Wikipedia)
  

The first number is a prediction of eventual total deaths; the second is an official estimate from the Red Cross (45-50 000), and the third includes an estimate from unnamed Haitian government officials of about 100 000; the Wikipedia article collects these latter two estimates, and it looks like both of them are current counts, not predictions.

I'm not going to take any cheap shots here; on the other hand, I'd suggest that estimating a large number when communication is poor and data incomplete is really hard.

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• Haiti devastation emerges (theworld.org)
• Haiti Death Toll Could Be Massive (themoderatevoice.com)

Site. Base. Whatever.

Scott Williams links to this article: The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It, which raises the comparison to the Roman Empire, which had thirty-seven.

This begs two questions:

1. What's a base?
2. Is the comparison to the Roman Empire a fair comparison?

The source for most of this information is the 2008 Base Structure Report, referred to by Mother Jones:

According to the Pentagon's 2008 "Base Structure Report," its annual unclassified inventory of the real estate it owns or leases around the world, the United States maintains 761 active military "sites" in foreign countries. (That's the Defense Department's preferred term, rather than "bases," although bases are what they are.) Counting domestic military bases and those on US territories, the total is 5,429.

And while the Mother Jones article for some reason glosses over the difference between the two terms, the Alternet story makes the distinction in its opening paragraph:

Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads."

The Mother Jones article goes on to note:

The overseas figure fluctuates year to year. The 2008 total is down from 823 in the Pentagon's 2007 report, but the 2007 number was up from 766 in 2006. The current total is, however, substantially less than the Cold War peak of 1,014 in 1967. Still, given that there are only 192 countries in the United Nations, 761 foreign bases is a remarkable example of imperial overstretch...

I'm not going to try to parse this one completely; the 2008 total is lower than any of the other years listed, so the author compares it to the number of countries in the United Nations. The better figure comes from this Mother Jones article which notes that there are bases (or are they sites?) in 39 countries, but that number may not be accurate.

Now the second question: is the comparison to the Roman Empire a fair comparison? Well maybe. In the days of the Roman Empire the world was a lot smaller than it is today, but what was a Roman base? Would it compare to an American "medium or large" base? No clue. The better Mother Jones article just says there were 37 of the former and there are 30 of the latter. I'd love to see lists of both: the list of castra article I found shows at least sixty. Hmmm.

I don't know what to make of the overall narrative, though: given the general tone of the two longer articles it seems more important to the authors to suggest some vague (and frightening?) correspondence between the Roman Empire and the "American Empire."

David Brooks on lottery tickets

The agents of destruction are many. State governments have played a role. They aggressively hawk their lottery products, which some people call a tax on stupidity. Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income. Aside from the financial toll, the moral toll is comprehensive. Here is the government, the guardian of order, telling people that they don’t have to work to build for the future. They can strike it rich for nothing.

So says David Brooks in the New York Times. Let's see: if there are three hundred million Americans, that works out to a thousand dollars per. If there are three hundred and thirty million that's nine hundred dollars per. That's just staggering.