How many lives has statistics saved?

Andrew C. Thomas suggests that the method of propensity scores has saved thousands of lives due to its use in medical and public health research. This raises the question of how could we measure/estimate the number of lives (or qalys, or whatever) saved by propensity scores. And then, if that could be done, it would make sense to do it in a context where you could estimate the lives saved by other methods (least squares, logistic regression, Kaplan-Meier curves, etc.) This all seems pretty impossible to me–how would you deal with the double-counting problems, also how do you deal with bad methods that are nonetheless popular. (For example, I hate the Wilcoxon rank test–as discussed in one of our books, I’d rather just rank-transform the data (if that is indeed what you want to do) and then run a regression or whatever. But Wilcoxon’s probably saved lots of lives.)

If one more generally wanted to ask how many lives have been saved by statistical methods in total, I’d want to restrict to medical and public health. Otherwise you have difficulties, for example, in counting how many lives were saved or lost due to military research in World War II and so forth.

5 thoughts on “How many lives has statistics saved?

  1. It would be equally interesting – and probably equally impossible – to answer the question of how many deaths statistics has caused.

    My statistician uncle, Alan Wallis, was employed by the Department of War (as it was then known) during World War II to apply statistical methods to patterns of bomb drops and shrapnel scatter, with the intent of increasing the probability of severe damage (and presumably casualties) around the target.
    A bit of political trivia: Wallis was undersecretary of state for economic affairs under George Schultz in the first Reagan term. He left when, as he put it, "the conservatives took over" in the second term.

  2. Seth's question brought to mind something I heard Jay Kadane say when I was a graduate student: "Statisticians quit smoking before doctors".

    This implies we figured out the causal nature of smoking and cancer before others. One might guess that this alone, and there has definitely been a drop in smoking in the US, might be the biggest life savings due to statistics in practice.

  3. It's hard to say how many lives statistics have saved/cost until we define "not using statistics" in detail sufficient to get a sense of the probable outcomes.

  4. Let's go for quality of life instead…Guiness Beer and Toyota cars, if I remember my anecdotes properly.

    Bombing accuracy can be debated until the cows come home… start with whether the Allied strategic bombing campaign had a significant effect on German war production, and have a major unresolved question before you can start asking whether it cost or saved lives…. Then, do statisticians get credit for cryptological successes? "Cause if so, they saved lives during WWII simply by shortening it….

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