In Running to Stand Still, Bono sang that you should “cry without weeping. Talk without speaking.” He can add “condemn without counting.” Recently, the U2 frontman declared that 300,000 have died as a result of USAID funding cuts. The source for this widely cited figure is an example of how some facts are simply too good to check in the media.
Bono said “This will f— you off” and explained that tens of thousands of tons of food are “rotting” in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston because of recent USAID cuts, adding “What is that? That’s not America, is it?”
“They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said, acknowledging that while some aid groups do good work, the USAID system has been riddled with corruption.
It turns out that the 300,000 figure comes from a speculative model put out by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University.
I was critical of how these cuts were handled initially. It does appear that some important programs were interrupted and, while later restarted, the interruptions created dire and potentially deadly conditions for some of the most desperate recipients of U.S. aid.
However, it is the figure of 300,000 that shows how such calculations go viral in this political environment.
Nichols insists that this was never an actual count but a projection. It is the parameters of the projections in The Washington Post that are so striking. Nichols admitted that
“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable). And 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t.”
In other words, it depends on whether the programs were actually discontinued and whether local officials stepped forward to continue them. Those seem like some pretty significant “ifs” and raise the question of why project over a quarter of a million deaths on such assumptions. It seems akin to projected hundreds of thousand of deaths from air accidents if every FAA system under Trump is suddenly turned off.
What is the value of a projections with such sweeping “likely highly variable” assumptions?
I still like Bono’s music. It is his math that leaves me with the feeling that “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”