I have to say that I was really shocked to see David Brooks devote an entire column yesterday to the question what would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the entire Western Hemisphere? His answer: Nothing good! Kerry Howley, baby hater, tries to stand up for the view that immigrants could replace us. I mostly want to take issue with Brooks’ anti-materialist view of why society would collapse:

Even after the event, material conditions would be exactly the same. People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.

But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.

This is nuts. Material conditions would be radically and immediately altered by a mass sterilization event. You don’t need to believe any outlandish claims about the efficiency of financial markets to note that markets would very quickly adjust the price of a whole range of things in light of the drastic alteration of demographic trends. How’s the already depressed housing market looking? The stock of companies that make baby food and other stuff for infants? Kindergarden teachers won’t be out of work for a few years, but the smart ones will start looking for new jobs immediately. And then there would, of course, be massive uncertainty in both hemispheres about the future of immigration policy. That would unsettle expectations, disrupt investment decisions, etc.

You’d probably have a very severe financial crisis with quite real consequences. A “huge collapse” scenario doesn’t strike me as at all implausible. But the mechanism is as material as anything else you like.

In order to help enlighten Bill O’Reilly, reader K.S. kindly produced a scatterplot chart associating life expectancy and population size. In order to avoid outliers, he excluded microstates with populations of under 500,000 and used the log of population rather than population. The results:

As you would expect, nothing doing here.

Max Baucus is making some big claims on his own behalf, according to Jeff Young:

A draft bipartisan healthcare reform bill being negotiated in the Senate would extend insurance coverage to 95 percent of legal U.S. residents, cost less than $900 billion and actually reduce the federal budget deficit over 10 years, Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday. [...] “The current draft of the bill scores below $900 billion over 10 years, covers 95 percent of all Americans by 2015 and is fully offset,” Baucus said. “In fact, according to the preliminary CBO report, the bill would actually reduce the federal deficit in the 10th year by several billion dollars.”

Is this possible? I can envision two scenarios. One is that the Finance Committee is defining “covers” in a pretty stingy way. A lot of reformers are going to have a big problem with that, if that proves to be the case, though I’m a bit more open-minded about the possible virtues of a bare-bones minimum benefits package. The other, which the artful phrase “scores below $900 billion over 10 years” makes me suspect, is that he’s basically accomplishing this through accounting gimmicks. If you phase a plan in slowly enough, you can get the 10 year score as low as you like.

Beware? (cc photo by jondoeforty1)

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Radley Balko, National Review offers us the appalling views of one LAPD officer:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

The fact that African-American men are disproportionately likely to be put in this position, and that some police officers have this mentality, does a lot to explain the generalized distrust of cops by many people in that demographic.

Meanwhile: This is insane. Most people like and respect cops, and honor the work they do. But it’s a profession that’s honored precisely because the people doing the job correctly don’t do the job this way. Police officers, in the course of duty, subject themselves to extra-normal risk of harm for the sake of the welfare of others. This is the mentality of a foreign occupying army, not a well-functioning police force.