Half the population dying and then returning five years later would be a really big deal

Half the population dying and then returning five years later would be a really big deal. 

Think of the supply-chains!

Matthew Yglesias. 

 May 10. 

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Over the weekend I saw “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” which opens with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange attending the wedding of Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams).

Apparently during the five years that he (and half of the planet) was dead,¹ she moved on and met someone else, and now he’s trying to be mature about it but is still not over her. The movie is actually pretty fun once it gets going — it has lots of action and adventure and thrills and frights and some laughs — but this longing is supposed to be Strange’s motivating force throughout the movie.

It’s also a great example of my biggest annoyance with the MCU in recent years. Obviously movies about superheroes are not going to be realistic, but good genre stories should take their own stories seriously. But instead, Marvel keeps flirting with the idea of taking this Snap/Blip business seriously — especially at the beginning of “Avengers: Endgame,” but also in snatches of other movies — only to sort of kick it aside. The Strange/Palmer relationship, for all the multiversal complications that play out in the film, ultimately plays out like a trope recognizable from dozens of other movies: Strange kinda messed up, didn’t get the girl, and now he’s sad about it and angry at himself.

But the actual scenario depicted in the story would have had insane, sweeping, society-bending consequences that are nowhere to be seen in the movies nor even really dissected in the Falcon TV show that is sort of about them.

Lessons from the Covid-19 inflation

The bout of inflation that we’re living through right now has several points of origin, but one really big one is that when the world economy collapsed in the spring of 2020, investors and decision-makers largely did not expect it to recover very quickly. The stock market, for example, fell very very steeply.

And at the time, I shared that pessimism. Here’s what I thought would happen:

A lot of businesses (especially related to travel and food service) would see huge revenue loss thanks to pandemic fear and formal restrictions.

Those revenue losses would lead to massive layoffs, and then the people who were laid off need to drastically curtail their spending.

Due to all the former food service, travel, and hospitality workers not spending any money, even sectors of the economy that weren’t shut down — like durable goods — would see a huge plunge in demand, leading to further layoffs.

State government budgets would be crushed by all this lost revenue, leading to tax hikes and furloughs of public sector workers and further hurting demand.

The upshot, or so I thought, was that even once concern about the virus was ameliorated, we would be looking at a long, slow recovery due to the collapse in incomes and spending. That mercifully did not happen; the government did several rounds of massive stimulus to stabilize incomes and spending came roaring back. Part of the inflation problem we’ve been dealing with more recently is that the economy got overstimulated.

But part of the inflation problem stems from the excessive pessimism of spring 2020. Lots of companies assumed they would be facing a prolonged period of weak demand, so they scaled back plans for production. Then when demand came roaring back, they weren’t ready. If everyone had known in advance how much stimulus would happen, they would have planned for it better and the inflation situation would be better. So today’s economic problems are in part a legacy of the poor response to the Great Recession leaving business leaders excessively pessimistic about recovery.

The Blip is much worse than that

Now imagine that instead of state governments ordering bars and restaurants to close, half the population died.

Separate from the chaos that would unleash, it would lead a prudent person to radically revise downward their estimate of future consumption. Half as many people means half as much demand for cars. And even that is probably an overestimate because there would be this huge glut of used cars on the market thanks to all the dead people. Used car prices would plummet to unheard-of depths that would really drag down new car production. With very little demand for new cars and half the workforce dead, tons of car companies would go out of business and lots of factories would be idled. Every year, as the stock of excess used cars is alleviated a little, the auto industry would start to come back a little. But then — bam — billions of people show up and none of them have a car anymore.

Well, used car prices are going to skyrocket, which pulls up the price of new cars. And in theory, the market should respond by increasing production of new cars. But a lot of the factories have been mothballed. And the cars can’t be built without parts — including the dread microchips — but the whole supply chain is going to take a while to restart. That’s the kind of problem we’ve been dealing with, only on a much larger scale.

Except they’d also be dealing with disruptions we didn’t have. Because as pessimistic as people may have been in the spring of 2020, they still figured that people would want to eat food. But if half the world’s population suddenly died, then several years down the road everyone would have adjusted to a new equilibrium where farmers are planting much less wheat, corn, rice, etc. And then suddenly the world’s population doubles with zero advance planning. Agricultural production can’t just be “spun up” in response to a surge in demand; it takes time to turn seeds into usable crops. You’d have insane price spikes and poor countries teetering on the brink of starvation.

Tons of violent, traumatic deaths

At any given time there are nearly 10,000 commercial airplanes in the sky.

If half the world’s population died instantly, many thousands of those commercial planes would crash, killing tons of people who weren’t snapped out of existence by Thanos, to say nothing of the many small private planes, cargo planes, etc. that would be dropping down. Some of them would hit people, smash houses, or otherwise wreak havoc. Lots of people who were in the middle of driving cars or trucks would have blipped away, leading to car wrecks that would have killed or injured non-blipped passengers or other drivers. This very large increase in the number of injured people would come concurrently with half the paramedics and ER personnel being dead. But the emergency rooms probably wouldn’t be overcrowded because the streets would be impassible with all the crashed and abandoned cars.

They sort of flicked at showing us the aftermath of this with Ant-Man going through a version of San Francisco that looked fairly post-apocalyptic.

But they don’t actually show us the toll, which would have been lots of people killed and maimed. And lots of survivors dealing with harrowing situations. Roads and bridges would be completely impassible — Manhattan would be cut off from the outside world. People would have had harrowing experiences until a semblance of basic services and commerce could be restored. People who lived through the whole thing would find it hard to relate to the returnees who missed everything.

Everyone would be incredibly fucked up

In “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” there’s some talk about the logistical havoc wreaked by needing to restart the school year to accommodate the new students even though it’s already past midterms.

That would, obviously, be a problem. As would the fact that they presumably wouldn’t have been operating a full suite of half-empty schools, so it’s not clear where students would even go. Remarkably, all of Peter Parker’s classmates seem to be amiably resettled back in New York City, which one should really not take for granted. But beyond the logistics, people should be really fucked up.

Christine moved on and married someone new which has Strange bummed out, but they were never really together. What about married couples that were separated by the blip? In some cases, a surviving partner would have found someone new who they’re not going to leave. In other cases, they absolutely would leave their someone new. The passage of time and disparate experiences might make it hard for some couples to reunite. Tons of orphaned kids who’d been living with other relatives suddenly have their parents back. Many people who snapped away as older siblings would return in effect younger than their little brothers or sisters.

Strange would, of course, be free to feel mopey about his situation. But I think he wouldn’t get much sympathy from anyone, because while it’s depicted as a huge bummer in the film, “single, childless guy is kinda sad that he missed a chance to get together with a girl he liked” is actually much milder than what a lot of people are going through. Try a parent whose kid died on an airplane during the snap, who mourned and then also had to cope with the crushing disappointment of learning that the kid didn’t come back with everyone else because he wasn’t vaporized by Thanos — he died when the pilot vaporized.

Who cares?

The prevailing spirit of our age is too little popularism in politics and too much in our cultural commentary.

In the analog era, I’m not really sure what made for commercially successful movie criticism. But in the internet era, fans of stuff like to read about the stuff that they are fans of. They would generally like it to be positive (it’s for fans after all), and the basic math is that the more popular something is, the more clicks there are to be harvested off of it. So the MCU juggernaut not only rules the box office but the content game, where every mid-credit teaser is an opportunity to write search-demand articles.

And on some level there’s no real point in complaining about any of this. It doesn’t really matter if the movies are good or bad.

But I do think it’s genuinely unfortunate how casually they deal with this stuff. There’s an old cliché about science fiction as “the literature of ideas” that I think is important and true. And these Marvel movies are essentially science fiction. But they don’t have any ideas. The most fantastical things imaginable happen in the movies, but the world they’re set in is incredibly banal. None of these stupendous events seem to matter at all, and nothing makes much of an impression on anyone. Wouldn’t it be a big deal if there turned out to be a secret African nation full of advanced technology that reluctantly decided to change course and open itself to the world? Do people in, I dunno, Dallas feel bummed out that there are no superheroes there?

The blip is the most annoying example of this because it keeps coming up over and over again across properties without any effort to take it seriously. In this case probably because it’s an idea that, if you take it seriously, is too enormous and horrifying to get your head around. But it would be nice to see some ideas somewhere taken seriously.

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In case you don’t know, at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” a villain named Thanos uses the Infinity Gauntlet to kill half of all living things for what I guess are environmentalist reasons. Then in “Avengers: Endgame,” our heroes bring everyone back.

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