"We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017."
This doesn't suprise me, and it's consistant with the feeling that western society has a problem of "safety at any cost". There is a one way ratchet with these types of rules because you can't be seen as the guy repealing safety legislation.
How many injuries (some likely to be very serious) are prevented or otherwise mitigated by car seats?
I also seem to recall some old story about the introduction of helmets to combat and the "surprising" result of injury increasing (but can't find it now). As in of course injuries increase when the previous result would have been death.
This is definitely possible - we've only looked at deaths.
One point to note about the 57 deaths number. There's also an argument to be made that you should apply the same burden of proof to claims that car seats reduce fertility, and that car seats reduce car crash fatalities. In other words, some people are skeptical of our methodology, which is totally fair. But if you subject the hypothesis that child car seats reduce car crash deaths to the same level of skeptical prior, the evidence in favor of saving lives is much, much weaker than the evidence on fertility, in our opinion.
The 57 deaths is our best point estimate from the regressions, but in the vast majority of specifications you can't rule out an effect of zero. By contrast, we find pretty strong evidence on the fertility reduction, that we think is fairly tightly identified compared with other competing explanations.
Even if we assume the numbers in the paper are correct, saving 57 children in a single year is a lot. I have a hard time weighing this against the minor inconvenience caused by the laws to require car seats.
I found it to be a pretty major inconvenience. Air travel in particular was quite inconvenient - having to either bring along car seats or otherwise arrange for them to be available on both sides of the flight.
If car seats existed but weren’t required, would you have chosen not to bring them? Or, phrased differently, was it just the legal requirement that caused you to bring them?
It's pretty telling that in many countries (e.g. the EU), child seat laws are relaxed in taxis. It's an acknowledgement that there can be a tradeoff between safety and convenience.
If it's OK to hold your child in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, why shouldn't it be OK to hold your child in the backseat of your friends' car on the way to the airport?
My guess would be that it's a question of numbers. You want 99% of kids to be in child seats, and can allow a few exceptions (since e.g. nobody does a commute to daycare in a taxi). But if you allowed private drivers to avoid car seats in limited circumstances, people would abuse that privilege and never use a car seat, turning that number down to 70% or lower
There is no fundamental "why". Sometimes a law only needs to get you 90% of the way to an ideal to satisfy legislators. We live our lives steeped in such procedural gaps, but to live any other way would probably become a micro-managed nightmare.
In theory, a taxi driver is a trained professional (like an airplane pilot) whose safety record, attentiveness etc is much higher than the average driver. In practice, probably not so much.
But when it comes to driving it doesn't really matter much because half the accidents involving two cars are someone else's fault.
I'm not sure if fault is that binary. Sometimes, you're right, the other driver is at fault and there is nothing you could do. But often, you can drive defensively in a way that protects you from even serious mistakes by others.
I have personally not been in far more accidents than I've been in just because one of the two parties was paying attention and took the correct evasive action. Sometimes that was me, sometimes it was someone else. This is only the cases I've noticed, there were probably times where I did something stupid and didn't realize it, and the other person took evasive action anyway, or even cases where I took the evasive action without noting the other person did something stupid.
We need to look out for each other. Nobody is perfect, but the better each individual does the better the whole is.
If not for the legal requirement I probably would choose not to bring them. In my opinion going for a few days without a car seat is an acceptable level of risk.
That’s fair. I don’t enjoy doing the double car seat lug, but I would continue bringing them even if not legally required. My kids are little, though, so that calculus would probably change if they were in booster seat territory.
I asked out of genuine curiosity, so I hope I didn’t seem standoffish.
Most of your accidents will occur while you’re close to home, because that’s where you likely will do most of your driving. It doesn’t really matter whether you get into a 30 mph collision on the boulevard next to your house or one three counties over…
I think the point was about the risk per baby-mile. If you’re going to fly and rent a car at the other side, you should bring the car seats. If you’re going to a metropolis with transit and walkability, maybe not. If an airport is a long distance from home, maybe so.
Decades ago, when I started hearing bad statistics that emphasized 'within 50 miles of home', I always thought that it was saying multi-hour roadtrips were automatically safer.
this makes a lot of sense. sure, "anything could happen", even in 50 miles, but the risk of an accident when driving a short distance is much less than the risk of an accident when driving longer distances.
this is simular to how the risk of contracting covid varies across different exposure scenarios. i'm hoping the pandemic will get us more used to thinking of risk on a continuum -- which may result in more sane policies around risk management.
I fear, wrt Covid19, it's the reverse - so many people saying masks are [totally] ineffective because breath can get around the sides.
It seems like the brainwashing that's been going on to convince people that they can't like policies, they have to be either political party A or party B has forced some notion of absolute bivalency in all matters -- everything is treated by a large proportion of the population as either 100% right or 100% wrong, subtlety seems to be entirely anathema.
"Can a viral spore get out of a mask? 'Yes', so noone should wear masks, they're an evil plot!" seems to be such a prevalent line of 'thinking'.
on the flip side, after six or seven months of quarantine, even the "safety at all costs!" crowd is figuring out how work limited social time into their lives.
Didn't Levitt and Dubner establish that a standard seatbelt would be safe enough to class as a car seat for children over 2 if they weren't explicitly banned by law.
Would you mind linking that if you have it around somewhere? It seems quite doubtful that a seatbelt would work on someone who isn’t even tall enough for the sash to go over their torso…
Airline seatbelts are designed to restrain you from flying out of your seat in turbulence. They will do little to restrain your head from hitting the seat in front in a front-on impact, and have a good chance of causing injuries in any kind of impact. For that reason, if an impact is considered more likely than usual, you will be instructed to assume the brace position. (Note also that crew have proper harnesses.)
IIRC, what they claimed is that there was no statistically significant evidence that car seats for children over two (i.e. not infants) saved lives.
I recall when I was young (before car seat laws), the car had shorter seat belts in the back. Almost as though they expected children to sit there . . .
It's just a very large volume of luggage to be traveling with. Two young children require an awful lot of luggage to begin with: diapers, wipes, food, changes of clothing, towels, toys, strollers, etc. And trying to keep them happy is stressful enough on its own. Add in two bulky car seats, which as I recall need to be checked at the gate so you need to bring them all the through the airport and security, and the whole experience can become downright unpleasant.
Car seats can be checked as hold baggage and claimed at baggage claim. In the US, I believe they have to be free (in any case, I never had to pay for them [nor strollers] and they never “counted” if it was just a car seat or stroller, even on Spirit).
We would generally bring the car seat onto the airline and have the child sit in the seat on the flight. It prevented some of the chaos of wanting to run around the airplane. “This is transport; just like in the car or other airplanes, you have to be in your seat.”
Needs a window seat (obvs) and the red sticker “approved for aviation use” (which the cabin crew did check every single time, which was impressive). Ask for a seatbelt extension and adjust the belt so the buckling is done on the side rather than smack in the middle of the seat.
There's clearly quite a difference between dead kids and kids not being conceived, or condom manufacturers would by lynched on street corners.
We can argue if the lives saved by seats are enough to counterbalance the inconveniences they pose, but among this inconveniences I would not put the reduction in the number of third children - I would actually put that as a plus, as a super-soft demographic control policy.
Births in western Europe are less than the amount needed to keep the population stable: the population of those countries is long term decreasing. (but there is often immigration to make up for it)
I think the US is about even, or slightly positive. But then the US has a lot less people than Europe on a per land area measure.
Western societies don't aim for safety at any cost. The states place a cost on each life, and you'll feel that the numbers are too high, but they're numbers, backed by rationales and research.
I looked up the number for one country now, and the report that contains the number also contains references to four decades of academic literature.
Exactly, any regulatory decision large or small usually has a ton of research and thought behind it. An interesting episode of planetmoney goes over the history of how to quantify harm/ a human life vs the cost of protective measures. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
Apparently the value sits at $10 million USD/ life now. If you take 57 babby * 10M / $200 / car seat = 2.8M car seats. There's apparently 3.7M babbies born in the US/ year. So I think if you accept these numbers it does still make sense.
What makes it a problem? It's a choice. We value existing quality of life more than quantity of life. Who says that's a problem? Who said less new people is a problem?
Many countries are currently struggling, or will soon struggle, with the impact of an aging population. Less new people can be a serious problem.
Quite apart from that, just conceptually, "safety at any cost" is obviously a major problem. If the cost is higher than the benefit we shouldn't do it.
It is a problem because that "quality of life" depends on demographics. If there's a huge amount of old people relative to the amount of young people, pension systems turn into a Ponzi scheme. People that are paying into the system now will not be getting their money back, unless the next generation pays even more. Rinse and repeat.
And before you say "we'll just take it from the rich", please do the math on how much money the rich have, versus the cost of pensions. It's sobering.
You seem to assume reducing fertility is a bad thing, hence the tradeoff with a small increase in safety is not worth it. I personally disagree. Reducing fertility rates across the world, without impacting personal freedoms, should be considered paramount.
I'm assuming you hold these views for environmental reasons? I don't think the quantity of human beings is a significant factor in the deterioration of our environment. We have plenty of stainable ways to provide for ten billion plus humans.
Most of the damage comes from unsustainable production. The amount of production happening per capita is increasing worldwide, and if we want to save the environment we have to enforce that production is sustainable.
> I don't think the quantity of human beings is a significant factor in the deterioration of our environment.
It definitely is. It drives demands for food, housing, and industrial development, which in turn put massive pressure on the environment. Displacement of bats because of human expansion, for example, is likely a factor in the appearance of covid19. The western way of life is destructive over the environment and will not scale easily if we are not careful.
> "I don't think the quantity of human beings is a significant factor in the deterioration of our environment. We have plenty of stainable ways to provide for ten billion plus humans."
We certainly can (and must) do much, much better at operating sustainable economies and reducing our per-capita environmental footprint. But it is unhelpful that the global population is still growing rapidly, consuming ever more land and resources.
Thankfully, as economies develop and standards of living increase, birth rates tend to decline. Current trends suggest the rate of population growth is slowing, and we will eventually reach a stable population some time between 2050 and 2100.
I'm certainly not suggesting we should be telling people they can't have children, but anything we can do to encourage sustainable family sizes and bring forward the date when we reach stability is generally a good thing.
I very much doubt that "we" have a way to provide the current "western" lifestyle to ten billion humans in a sustainable way. Because that's the "ideal" most humans on this planet are striving for...
The “way” is technology. Malthus famously saw exponential population growth outstripping linear growth in food production. Earth had an estimated carrying capacity of about two billion people as I recall, and it turns out that their estimates were pretty good by and large.
But, they didn’t account for technological takeoff, which allowed us to escape that linear production growth. Nearly half the nitrogen in your body came from the Haber–Bosch process.
The number of humans is almost certainly one of the main multipliers. If you halve the number of people I'm pretty sure you'd close to halve emissions and pollution and habitat loss. I think "less people" is easier to achieve than some global political consensus and the fall of capitalism. And no I don't think "sustainable" and capitalism anywhere near it's current form fit in the same world.
Protecting nature is not a market force so you need some other mechanism for that.
A quick google search suggests we need to cut emissions by 80%. For population control to be a meaningful play, we're talking about cutting the entire world down under 2 billion people.
And this is assuming people on average are responsible for equal amounts of emissions. But the rich are overwhelmingly bigger contributors on a per capita basis, and as automation continues it gets easier and easier for a small number of people to be responsible for a large amount of consumption.
It's not so much about energy as it is about growing food and consuming soil. While most of the world is still living in abject poverty, we are already over-exploiting some resources (excessive fishing and growing, for example), which is not sustainable. By the time everyone gets to achieve a "western" lifestyle, unless we reduce fertility rates, it's unlikely the Earth will be able to sustain us.
Some of this process seems to be somewhat natural, since fertility has historically fallen in line with economic and social development, but we still need to ensure this remains true. South America, Africa and Asia are slowly "coming online" and if we're not careful we'll be fighting over scarce resources before everyone has had a chance to experience wealth.
I think you're missing the far more obvious disaster scenario that the population keeps doubling. How are you going to reduce emissions by 80% if we have 15 billion people?
"Only 57 children survived an accident that would otherwise have died (in one year), clearly we should scrap laws that demand carseats for children"
This idea that something that is (at most) a mild inconvenience (make sure the children in your car are well-protected) equates to "safety at any cost" is plainly ridiculous. The same reasoning is at the foundation for why the US now has +200000 people dead from the COVID-19 virus.
"In the United States, 675 children 12 years old and younger died as occupants in motor vehicle crashes, 4 and nearly 116,000 were injured in 2017. Of the children 12 years old and younger who died in a crash in 2017 (for which restraint use was known), 35% were not buckled up."
> This idea that something that is (at most) a mild inconvenience
The argument in the paper is that it's not just a mild inconvenience, but rather a complete showstopper for many couples, that they can't afford a larger car so they simply stop having children.
The argument also isn't between car seats and letting your baby crawl around the floor, it's about the upper age limit for kids that also have some degree of protection from regular seatbelts. AAP recommendations are that kids should be in a five-point restraint car seat until age 8. Nobody does this. Should it be legislated?
Not necessarily. I use a five point harness when I'm racing. With a helmet and a foam neck brace, I have walked away from getting T-boned in the driver door. But that extra equipment impedes visibility that I might need e.g. when parking.
I've driven a fully caged car from coast to coast (US), but from what I understand I took a risk. The harness and cage and restraint are all designed to with together. The human body stretches in a collision, so there is risk of head injury compared to a street car. I trust the equipment in the race car with my life, but there is a reason I don't drive one to work every day.
> The argument in the paper is that it's not just a mild inconvenience, but rather a complete showstopper for many couples, that they can't afford a larger car so they simply stop having children.
If they cannot afford a larger car now, they most probably cannot afford the cost of raising a third child in the coming years, so that they are dissuaded immediately instead of being into deep financial trouble down the road is a pretty good outcome!
> This idea that something that is (at most) a mild inconvenience
We don’t mandate 5 point harnesses in cars. We don’t mandate helmets in cars. Both of those are milder and would save more lives than having to buy bulky and expensive car seats and carry them with you so they can be used in any car you get in. The world is a never ending risk benefit calculation. We constantly make tradeoffs.
> The same reasoning is at the foundation for why the US now has +200000 people dead from the COVID-19 virus.
No it is not. Taking something that is orders of magnitude larger to try and justify your point is not exactly compelling.
In fact the US bans 5 point harnesses in cars (or did last I checked), the idea being they think people would drive less safe if they knew that level of protection, combined with they are harder to put on so less people would use them. I don't believe the arguments, but they exist.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that COVID shutdowns and reduction in miles driven have saved 100 children and 400 or more adults from car crash related deaths in 2020.
Perhaps we should extend the lockdowns indefinitely; think of the children!
I would guess that there is also an effect where the frustration of having to strap a child into a car seat means that you end up taking less car trips with kids along. This would further reduce the number of accidents involving children compared to a no car seat world.
On the other hand America has a poor record with car crash fatalities compared to other similarly developed countries. It could do with ratcheting things up a bit further.
The higher numbers of traffic fatalities in the US aren't simply because Americans drive further- American roads are more dangerous per billion vehicle km than roads in other developed countries.
Another example related to children - in 1993 guidance changed from having children sleep on their front to having them sleep on their backs. The result was a reduction in SIDS deaths from 0.13% to 0.035%. However the rate of kids having a flat spot on the back of their heads increased to 47% of 2 month olds. That flat spot pushes the rest of their skull forward and can result in a prominent forehead and misshapen features (iow, makes your kid ugly). Is the trade off between a 0.1% reduction in death rate worth a 50% chance of being ugly?
If you ever tried to console a parent who lost a child while he was sleeping, you would want to reduce the death rate as much as possible, no matter how many extra uglies we get.
Every death is a tragedy, but public policy is a balancing act, you can't spend infinite resources and goodwill (directly or by imposing costs on others) on saving every life, because you'll have nothing left for the next 10,000 lives you need to save.
Don't confuse newsworthiness with importance. The news cares more about novelty than consequences. Something like 700 children drown every year and that fails to make headlines, because it's not surprising.
> We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017
That cannot be properly evaluated without considering second and additional order effects, like everyone driving huge SUVs to fit these child seats. All else is never equal.
> western society has a problem of "safety at any cost"
No, I think just America. Europe isn't so safety crazed.
For instance, it's common for Europeans not to wear bicycle helmets.
> > We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017
> That cannot be properly evaluated without considering second and additional order effects, like everyone driving huge SUVs to fit these child seats. All else is never equal.
> > western society has a problem of "safety at any cost"
> No, I think just America. Europe isn't so safety crazed.
I would say that is a gross oversimplification. It depends a lot on country, on safety "area" etc.. For instance most European countries have much stricter laws around car safety (e.g. in Germany you have to get an extensive safety check every couple of years) and driver licences.
Regarding bicycle helmets I think this is much more a function of when the cycling culture developed in the country, e.g. in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark biking has been a common way of commuting for a long time (way before helmets came about) and helmets are not that common, while in Sweden for instance most cyclists were helmets.
>No, I think just America. Europe isn't so safety crazed.
Well, US are crazy about reponsabilities (the "objects seen in this mirror ...") more than safety.
The EU (generally speaking) tends to be more attentive to some more practical aspects of safety, as an other commenter noted periodical revisions/check of cars, or fire regulations tend to be much stricter than the US.
But - cannot say in other EU countries - here (Italy) we have our own forms of craziness.
Back to the children seats, we have now a new norm mandating an alarm (also via Bluetooth and/or SMS) on seats to prevent parents forgetting toddlers strapped to the seat and walking away after having parked the car.
There were countrywide a very small number of child deaths for this reason (8 or 9 documented cases in the last 20 year or so), and while this is extremely sad it doesn't seem to me like it jutifies the provision.
It's common to ride without a helmet in countries where cycling is a normal activity. Basically Netherlands, Denmark, parts of Belgium, Germany and France. Where cycling is mostly a leisure activity on the weekends and for enthusiasts, helmet usage is much higher.
I never considered the possibility of wearing a helmet on a bike in non-competitive settings in Italy. Only after I moved to the UK (and had children), did I start using it regularly. To this day I’m not sure whether it’s compulsory or not, but most people have it, so...
It's not compulsory in the UK to wear cycle helmets.
There has been the occasional attempt to pass such a law in the past, but none were successful. Cyclist organisations are very averse to helmet laws, seeing them as marking cycling out as some unusually dangerous activity, which in turn has an inevitable negative effect on cyclist numbers.
Temporary or permanent disability is also important.
As I won't pay Elsevier to read this article, I can't evaluate the (likely) methodolgical failings. Even major journals sometimes let papers with significant methodological flaws through, (e.g. the disastrous mistake of publishing the vaccine-autism fraud, which has cost many lives).
I do retrospective research of a different kind, and struggle with making causal inference from non-experimental data. This is an inescapable philosophical and scientific problem, and the very fact they talk about a "causal channel" (novel verbiage to me, btw) raises an eyebrow.
As a starting point, the publisher, SSRN, recently sold out to the Elsevier monster. SSRN, according to first line of its FAQ, "is a platform for the dissemination of early-stage research."
Why is this research "early stage?" I suggest it simply failed to meet submission standards for more reputable journals. This is hardly breaking news, likely just low quality work.
If I cared more, I would also, in addition to reviewing the actual article, check the credentials of the authors for bias due to religious, business, funding or political affiliations.
The authors force us to consider the competing implicit demands that people may procreate without external constraint, and that all children's welfare is to a degree the responsibility of society. On the first, what law doesn't (somehow, via a "causal channel!") affect people's ability to procreate?
My points all apply, even if I thought it did not warrant pursuing to the full text. I did not state the article was wrong, although I think it is quite likely to be worthless, and therefore not worth my time.
This doesn't suprise me, and it's consistant with the feeling that western society has a problem of "safety at any cost". There is a one way ratchet with these types of rules because you can't be seen as the guy repealing safety legislation.