Will Musk kill 9 million people?

 

While head of DOGE, the department of government efficiency, Elon Musk dismantled the US Agency for International Development, UDAID. Many claimed that would lead to massive deaths. The Lancet medical journal tried to quantify the human toll – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030.

Statistics are the easiest and most effective way to lie to people because very few understand statistical analysis and are suckers for charlatans who pretend to be experts. A few have responded to the poor analysis by the Lancet. One of the better is at Reason magazine. 

Having spent a few years working in statistical analysis, including working for a company that produced the best statistical analysis software, I agree with the Reason analysis. And I have a few points to add. People seem to ignore the other factors Lancet included in its analysis: "...gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (GDP pc PPP); public expenditures on education, health, and the military (each on as a percentage of GDP); literacy rate; Gini index; the percentage of households with inadequate sanitation and with access to piped water; the number of doctors per 1000 population; and the number of hospital beds per 1000 population." 

The coefficients for each of those variables tell how much each contributed to preventing deaths during the period under analysis, the two previous decades. Here are the coefficients:

USAID - 0.902

Gini Index - 1.065

Primary Education  (% population) - 0.988

Education expenditure (% GDP) -  0.935

Piped water (% population) - 0.950

Adequate sanitation (% population)  - 0.944

Nurse rate (per 1,000 population) -  0.885

Hospital bed rate (per 1,000 population) -  0.981 

Health expenditure (% GDP) -  0.96

Military expenditure (% GDP) - 1.077

Except for the Nurse rate, all other factors had higher coefficients, or weights than that of USAID. What does that mean? Essentially, it means every factor but the number of nurses had a larger impact on saving lives than did USAID. Why is that important? Because Lancet assumed that those lives that its study shows USAID saved in the past will be lost in the future without the aid if nothing else changes. 

However, it should be easy to see that the nations affected by the aid cuts could easily counter the loss by spending more on any of the other areas. Increasing military spending alone would save more people than did USAID, at least according to the Lancet study.