Tuesday Links: Families in the City, Medicare Bankruptcy, Malthus Returns, the Not-Racist NYPD, and Obesity

Cities like New York and Washington are undergoing something of a baby boom as families increasingly settle in urban areas instead of the suburbs. This demographic development is causing new sorts of problems—like the relative unfriendliness of some city services to children—and conservatives need to be ready with real policy solutions for these young families.

It turns out Obamacare’s alleged Medicare savings don’t really add up to much. Too bad the AP tells us after the legislation passes.

Mother Jones’ May issue includes a truly astounding series of articles on population and sustainability that argues, explicitly, that Malthus was right after all. One article, not online, even goes so far as to suggest the government deliberately engineer a zero-GDP-growth economy, a scheme even the author admits suffers from more than a few conceptual and practical flaws.

Heather Mac Donald swats down the New York Times’s sloppy accusations of NYPD racism: “The actual crime rates reveal that blacks are being significantly understopped, compared with their representation in the city’s criminal population, another reason for omitting them from the paper’s reporting.”

And last but not least, Megan McArdle explores whether obesity is as much of a problem as the worrywarts tell us. The surprising conclusion: not really, and we can’t do much about it anyway.