What he said.

So how does Vegas know?

Last night’s play-in game between North Carolina A&T and Liberty looked pretty lopsided. NCAT wasn’t very good; with just 15 wins, Liberty might be one of the three worst teams to ever get into the NCAA tournament.

Yet Vegas had the line at +2. WTF? As the Czabe put it, that line stunk.

And what happened? NCAT won. By a point.

Joel Kotkin piles on Richard Florida. Not for the faint of heart.

Over the weekend Galley Friend J.T. gushed about Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye. I was pretty skeptical–Fraction has never blown my skirt up and the Fear Itself miniseries was, by the even by the standards of Marvel Event Comics, pretty lackluster.

But my goodness, Hawkeye is something else. The first trade paper just came out and you can get it from Amazon for $10. Go read it. Right now.

I don’t even quite know how to sell the series to you. Tonally, it’s like a cross between Queen & Country and Alias, two of my favorite series in recent years. Only funnier. And the layout is brilliantly inventive. (See here.) Every single page is fresh and bustling with energy. I really can’t say enough about about this book. It’s fantastic.

In trying to find something to compare Hawkeye with, I started thinking about some of the comics I’ve really loved in recent years. And it struck me that while the last 10 years haven’t been a golden age, and there’s been a lot of dreck–there have been a lot of really, really high-quality books. Books that I’ll want to revisit. Just a partial list:

Identity Crisis

Whiteout

Queen & Country

Astonishing X-Men

Runaways

Alias

Incognito

Quesada’s Daredevil “Father”

Batman Noel

This is just off the top of my head and doesn’t include stuff like The Walking Dead that other people love. You probably have your own list.

But here’s the thing: None of these books is groundbreaking in the way that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns were. But I’d argue that this is a good thing–because it means that the medium has matured enough as a medium that books can make a mark purely in terms of storytelling without having to break molds and do double-duty as paradigm shifters.

They can just tell stories.

Now people have been doing serious story-telling in indie comics for decades. But these aren’t indie books. These are mass-market comics put out, for the most part, by the two dominant houses. That’s amazing progress.

In the course of talking about how great our low-fertility future is, Froma Harrop argues:

Scaremongering over demographics is a divide-and-conquer strategy: Convince younger workers that they are paying for plush programs sure to collapse by the time they get old, and they’ll bring them down. And as a double-scoop, say that these programs make the “demographic winter” worse by having government replace the children who traditionally supported their elders. For example:

“The most insidious effect of the Social Security and Medicare regimes is that they actually shift economic incentives away from having children,” Jonathan V. Last, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, says in his book, “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.”

Here’s a counter-argument: These programs reassure parents bearing the considerable expense of raising children that they won’t be destitute if they can’t save enough for their old age.

In general, I find that arguing opinions over these sorts of matters isn’t particularly productive–people usually wind up suggesting that their preferred policies will produce the best outcomes. Funnily enough. That’s why What to Expect is heavily data-driven, and relies almost entirely on research. (For example, I wish that abortion was illegal–and I think there are compelling moral and philosophical reasons to ban it. But the data suggests that abortion does not today play a significant role in depressing fertility rates in the United States.)

Anyway, the reason I suggest in What to Expect that Social Security may be crowding out incentives for having kids is that there are two recent studies that have looked at the question closely and tried to isolate the effects. Both teams came to the conclusion that Social Security depresses the American fertility rate by about 0.5 children. (You can read them here and here.) These studies are, of course, referenced in the notes. If Harrop had read What to Expect a little more closely, she would have seen them.

Mind you, this isn’t to say that these two studies are the final word on the subject. I’d go further and suggest that we shouldn’t delude ourselves about the power of social science to provide definitive answers to such big, complicated questions. As I say in the book, the limits of social science are even nearer than we think.

All of that said, however, it strikes me that starting the discussion from a base of data is probably more fruitful than beginning with your ideological preferences and just riffing from there. I like Policy A, therefore Policy A must create better outcomes.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Harrop here. Maybe she’s made intensive study of entitlement policy and the fertility rate and is basing her counter-argument on research. And certainly, like in the case of abortion, there are moral cases to be made for Social Security and the entitlement state–it may be that such programs are worth having despite whatever costs they incur in terms of fertility. That’s certainly a defensible position; one that I probably agree with, actually.

But in that case, it would be more helpful for Harrop to simply make that moral case without trying to delude people into believing that the good she is selling comes for free (in terms of fertility). Whatever your preferences on entitlements are, the evidence suggests that it does not.

For whatever it’s worth, my Final Four is Christian Laettner, Danny Ainge, Marcus Camby, and Tyler Hansbrough.

With Laettner over Hansbrough in the finals.

Anyone who doesn’t have Laettner as the eventual champ has a dark, dark soul.

The reason I missed the Veronica Mars stuff yesterday was, obviously, the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. I don’t have any especially keen observations or thoughts about Francis–for that you should be following George Weigel.

But I do have a thought about part of the world Pope Francis is inheriting, and that is this: You cannot understand the real philosophical problems of the West–which have been mounting for 40 years–without reading Mary Eberstadt’s new book How the West Really Lost God.

Mary Eberstadt is one of the brightest minds in Washington. (By happy coincidence, she’s also one of the nicest people in D.C.) She’s been writing great stuff for as long as I’ve been in journalism, but this book is pretty clearly her masterwork. I got the galleys a couple weeks ago and what it does is basically take the demographic data and do really smart metaphysics with it. This is a many-splendored book, but the general thesis is that the decline of the family and the decline of religion aren’t just linked–the former is actually powering the latter.

You can read the introduction online now, but I’d highly recommend ordering a copy now. This is one of those seminal books which should change the entire discussion of demographics, religion, and the decline of the West.

I was going to post on the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign yesterday afternoon, but then all that other stuff happened. And this morning the campaign already blew through its goal. So the movie is happening.

I’m a pretty big Ronnie Mars fan. (Big enough that this is on the wall in my office, surrounded by my other bits of geekery.)

So a Veronica Mars movie was the second best bit of news from yesterday.