[lbo-talk] crises kill

[Ben Jackson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 2:58 PM,  <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Thu, February 28, 2008 7:47 am, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Three or four years ago I posed the question on Pen-L as to how many
> > people the IMF had slaughtered. One person (I forget who) did a fairly
> > careful calculation and came up with the tentative figure (if I remember
> > correctly) of 22 million (I think in a 20 year period).
>
> This is probably a drastic underestimate. It would be at least 20 million
> in, say, Latin America alone (due to higher infant mortality and higher
> death rates). Falling male life expectancies in Russia alone accounted for
> 7 to 8 million deaths over a 15-year period. My guess is, structural
> adjustment cost the lives of somewhere between 75 and 100 million human
> beings.

I have no doubt that neoliberal policies have caused millions of
deaths, but what is your baseline here? Is this a projection based on
trends underway before the eighties?  What is the proposed scenario
under which these deaths would not have occurred?