No, Elon Musk Didn't Kill Millions
Look at me, contributing to the Discourse
The Internet is aflame with an accusation that DOGE (and, thereby, Elon Musk) is responsible for the deaths of millions because it cut funding for various aid programs. The claim comes from a study, but this post isn’t going to debate the study because it’s not relevant. I’ll just take, for the sake of argument, as given that aid cuts cause deaths and that quantitatively everything in the study checks out.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the causal story is true, but the nature of the discourse given that is bad, and it touches on interpreting policy research, so it has, however tenuous, a connection to what this blog usually studies.
Every large government policy like this has mortality impacts. Every single one. If you cut taxes or raise them. If you require stricter medical ethics rules. If you criminalize drugs or make them legal. If you decide to spend X on aid, instead of 2X.
How many people did the folks who decided to fund USAID at its prior funding level kill because they didn’t fund it at twice that level?
It’s surprising that most of the defense of DOGE has so far focused on problems with the study, etc. That’s not the point. Policymakers cannot and should not choose policies that minimize worldwide mortality, and, certainly, if they do not implement such policies, they are not “responsible” for the deaths caused by not implementing the maximally mortality-reducing policy.
The Argument (a publication I generally like, for what it’s worth) says it directly in this article, right in the lede:
Elon Musk really doesn’t want you to say he’s responsible for the deaths of millions.
So yes, that the folks behind DOGE are responsible for these deaths is clearly what people want to argue in the Discourse. The phrase is probably overused, but there is a “motte-and-bailey” vibe to this where folks make the strong claim that Elon Musk is responsible for the deaths of millions and then they retreat to the claim that X people died because of aid cuts. These are different claims. Moral responsibility for death is clearly distinct from passing or not passing various laws or funding various programs.
I’m sure I could’ve saved incremental lives by donating a larger percentage of my income to some life-saving program. I’m not responsible for any deaths. That’s silly.
People die because the speed limit is 70 mph instead of 45 mph. Is every local politician who keeps the speed limit at 70 responsible for the road deaths? What about everyone opposed to the prohibition of alcohol?
It’s definitely a useful, worthwhile thing to do to study the mortality impacts of a policy. It’s part of analyzing policy impacts—alongside other impacts!—and as a study, there are no issues with this. But we shouldn’t take such analysis and use it politically to parcel out responsibility for various deaths to policymakers. It’s a never-ending war where the different sides produce excess mortality studies for each of their opponent’s policies.
Hot take: I think it’s a bad idea to make our politics one where we regularly accuse our opponents of murder if they cut funding for a program.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn
I don’t think this is the right argument at all. The speeding ticket analogy in particular highlights the differences.
Let me offer you another analogy that I think is closer. If a town is building a bridge. They decide to build it faster and not following any of the existing standards. Experts write to them and tell them that doing so will result in fatalities. These people are not policy makers, nor do they have experience in the subject area. They ignore all of this and build the bridge exactly as they wanted.
Predictably, there are fatalities.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to say the elected officials of the town are responsible for those fatalities, in a way that if they had built the bridge following existing standards and code and there had been some baseline level of fatalities they would not be justified