Study Explains Why We Arrest Moms for Putting Kids in Nearly Non-Existent Danger

It seems like a good majority of TED talks are based far more on flashy presentation and emotion than hard fact.

> and 2) four crash tests that were run by an anonymous test center.

He addresses that criticism directly in the video by saying that there are another 45,000+ incidences of real-world crash data that have been analyzed.

> "Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats vs Seat Belts in Reducing Risk for Death in Children in Passenger Vehicle Crashes" [2]; it's freely available, but I have yet to read it.

Well, if you did read it(you don't even have to read it, just look at the easy-to-read tables), you would see that their data results match exactly with what Levitt is saying -- there is not real difference! However, their conclusion is different, because they have an additional variable, which is that they determine if that car seat was "seriously misused".

I have to admit, I never heard this before and it is hard to believe, given that conventional wisdom says that child seats are safer, however, the data does seem to back up what he is saying.

It really sounds to me like you are the one that is falling victim to exactly what he is claiming, "It must be right, because that is what everyone believes--plus it is kids!"

You do know that instead of knee-jerk criticizing someone for believing what an economist says, you can go through his data, show where his methods, data, or conclusion is wrong and help everyone! (... and be famous in the process)

I didn't watch the Ted talk, I read the chapter in his book. So I don't have the high emotional response.

What I see is that child seats are being DOT approved much as if car crash data only had to exist for one vendor selected model for one configuration of passengers and then cars with similar mass distribution were deemed inherently safe for any configuration. Thus, there is nothing in the approval to indicate that whatever approved car seat you buy achieves a safety purpose.

I don't really care if Levitt can prove that they are on average less safe. The point that they will have a random distribution between better and worse than nothing for their only purpose is why they are a fraudulent industry that can't be mandated by legislation. I would rather parents that don't care to do research buy nothing than buy the cheapest or prettiest or most adjustable fine avoidance mechanism. Forcing uninformed purchases furthers the average level of safety fraud, pushing the market to converge towards less safety.

The chosen system lets DOT look important as they raise that minimum bar to exclude the loopholes used by the very cheapest seats while fighting industry lobbying.. It is like they are looking for a new batch of deaths from encouraging a market for extremely dangerous products to be important again.

I didn't share your reaction to the video.

You talk about his ego, and say the video is terrible, and the data it's based on is biased, and also criticize him for being awkward. (Hey, I'm awkward. Careful.)

Most of these seem like personal attacks, was that the intent?

On the merits, I leaned far more towards his position when I heard Ray LaHood's response, which boiled down to, "I don't have the luxury of looking at data, because I'm a grandparent."

You said it was egotistical for Levitt to claim he looks at data, but his main opposition literally decries bothering to look at data, that's not a straw man.

If our transportation agency can't be bothered to ascertain whether something is a placebo or not before mandating it, I see no reason to treat it as somehow sacred and beyond pejorative.

> He flat out admits that his only sources of his "research" are 1) the DoT NHTSA's FARS [0] and 2) four crash tests that were run by an anonymous test center.

Nope. You didn't watch it to the end, did ya? From the transcript: "In my data, and in another data set I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, I find very small differences in injury. So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. In the New Jersey data, which is different, because it's not just fatal crashes, but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, but generally they're the minor injuries."

> The FARS data is heavily biased as well. First, it only reports _accidents with fatalities_.

The NJ data reports injuries, too.

> At the time of the video it spanned 30 years of data, 1975-2005. There's incredible amounts car safety improvements in that time frame.

That point was addressed, by analysing more recent subsets of the data. From the transcript: "And the other thing you might argue is, 'Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. And so if we look at recent crashes -- the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data -- you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better.' But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, actually, are doing even better than the car seats

> The only source that I found which I actually liked is called "What If These TED Talks Were Horribly Wrong?"

Skepticism sells. Hate to be the one who appeals to authority, but I have more faith in a data scientist (with a PhD and published articles and all that jazz) doing analysis, than a meta-analysis by a journalist whose main achievement is writing plays, and whose main aim is create controversy for clicks.

Have an upvote well deserved. Thank you for making me laugh, even on a serious matter as this.

I mean, also, the neighbor was trespassing on the mother's property and spying on her baby. That's pretty freaking creepy and a lot like harassment.

I, too, am pleased, although not without understanding - Gah!

It comes from having solved the real problems that killed kids - I think around 1900 it was 30% didn't live to adulthood. So now we invent problems.

Partially from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_danger#Criticism

> The concept has been criticized for ignoring the fact that most child abductions and harm result not from strangers, but rather from someone the child knows.

Just speculating here...but I blame a lot of the social shift on social media and 24/7 news. A one off mother does something bad - therefore everyone might be that one off mother.

Also a lost in sense of community. As the study shows, if you know the reasoning for why the mother left the kid in the car, people are less likely to judge the situation as dangerous.

If you all knew your neighbors, and you see someone's kid running around, you'll know why that kid is by themselves and probably less likely to called Child Services.

One of my coworkers had child services called on him. His son's school let out early. His son forgot his keys that day, so he climbed through an open window through the 2nd floor. Neighbor saw this...called Child Services.

The state has taken over all of the collective interests in the welfare of children. This leaves the parents and the government as the only beings who have a responsibility and authority over a child's life. This is more pronounced in the suburbs than in urban neighborhoods in my experience, having lived in a variety of both. I think it's a very unhealthy way of thinking about raising children. It takes a village and all that.

When families live in areas where they naturally commingle they tend to be interested in the welfare of others around them. I think that's why it's more of an issue in the physically isolating suburbs.

Fear and social pressure.

It's the same reason a new mom won't eat cheese or fish for the entirety of her pregnancy.

For a small price (inconvenience), they avert assuage that fear.

Secondly, social pressure.

While it's entirely unlikely your child will be kidnapped at a playground if left unattended, it's extremely likely someone will call the cops if they see an unattended little kid.

I'd add the disaster that happened to most US cities in the last 30 or so years to the list of reasons: urban sprawl and the factual abandonment of public transport.

In large swaths of suburbia, people almost never walk anywhere. When they want to "go outside" they take a car to the park. The result is that the concept of "waiting on a sidewalk for the bus" is so foreign they don't even consider it an option. Let alone "walking to the bus stop".

There are a few places where street life still exists – mostly really large cities and really small & old ones.

It's a tragedy how the convenience of taking a car right to the front door of some megastore has gutted city life. Shopping used to mean a walk down Main St. with more, smaller owner-operated stores and a high probability of meeting someone and stopping for some coffee. But that took longer, and you needed to live close by (=smaller houses/properties). And sometimes it rained, and those shop were more expensive, and we decided a worthy human being is in the office 46h/week.

(not that those aren't legitimate reasons. It's more a matter of taste, and most people apparently don't share mine).

Getting your picture of the world through media means getting it from examining the extreme outliers? I don't have data, only a suspicion, this is relevant if it can be shown that people get much more information about their world from media than they used to, and/or that the media has turned more global, meaning less local reports but fishing for extreme stories in the wider world. This could explain why (if) the image of the world, including the local world, has become more extreme, which could in turn explain more extreme and less relaxed attitude(s).

In addition though, I think a contributing factor is cars, cars , cars everywhere. Having grown up in East Germany, I would be much more concerned about letting my kids (if I had any) roam around in the exact same area where I grew up in very freely. The roads are much more dangerous now for inattentive playing children. And as a local issue, a vastly increased number of ticks in the forests around my childhood home, but as I said, that's just a local issue.

Even before the arrival of social media, the mass media was feeding people stories about the world which made it look far more dangerous than it actually was. So media isn't the reason.

The reason is that the majority political philosophy in the US has shifted from libertarianism/classical liberalism to progressivism. The libertarian point of view is that people generally should be free to go about their own business in the manner they see fit. The progressive point of view is that we have a collective responsibility to police the wrongdoing of other people and fix it, using state power if necessary.

In the video where the guy goes off at the mother for leaving her kid in the car, you can see the progressive power dynamic in play immediately. The guy thinks she's doing something wrong so he gets involved. (Who is he? Doesn't matter. It's everyone's job to right wrongs.) It takes maybe 15 seconds before someone mentions the police, because the only way such intrusive activism works is when a higher power (can be state, law, society, science, God, whatever) is used to identify and enforce a definition of what's right. Even though the activist doesn't explicitly threaten to call the cops, during the confrontation they are mentioned constantly because the threat of state power is the only reason the mother even has to give this guy the time of day.

If you want to go a level deeper and ask why this political shift has occurred, it's likely that one contributing factor is urbanization which been underway in the US for some time--historically densely populated cities tend to be more authoritarian than rural areas because a crazy person can do more damage in a dense city (you don't see mass shootings happening in cornfields).

"Where did this collective insanity come from?"

From the paternalistic insanity of authoritarian collectivism.

Pet theory: it's competitive virtue signaling.

Mom A doesn't just send the kids to the bus stop, she stands there with them. So mom B also begins standing. Then mom A starts meeting them at the bus in the afternoons....

There's no end to it. Parents say and do the "right" things because they are better parents -- or at least the optics looks like they are. So other parents are forced to follow suit. Given enough of this insanity, the next logical step is to start using the criminal justice system to enforce what being a good parent is.

The internet and social media are just making this worse, btw.

The first off the top of my head is over the top DA's and police backed by a general authoritarian political class.

I live in Long Island City (a neighborhood in NYC for those not from the area - it's in Queens) and I see many children, but few that are unattended, despite the very low crime rate.

Of course, LIC is full of well off yuppies, so perhaps the demographics are the reason.

Hear! Hear! Let's all join RMS in his anti-natalism pledge, and set a better example by making proud announcements that we don't plan to reproduce ourselves! [1]

[1] http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

did they really see what looked like a gun? is a pretty low bar for opening fire. Especially when taking into account that training is shoot to kill.

In the late eighties we imprisoned a bunch of daycare workers for satanic ritual sexual abuse, based on tedtimony coerced from children over long periods. No physical evidence was ever found.

I didn't grow up in the US. I have to say the biggest cultural shock in my ~15 years here has been the lack of freedom in day to day life.

Ironic.

Is it okay to ask where you moved to?

> The police are also very rarely involved in school discipline,

Police are so involved in school discipline that it has its own name -- School to prison pipeline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

I was in high school in the US 2004-2008. We had a police officer on our suburban campus full time. (1600 students, mostly white/asian, high graduation and high college entrance rate).

He rarely did anything, but he was there full time. I got the impression it was mostly drug enforcement. Some kids got busted with dumb amounts of drugs (freshman had a bag of MDMA in his locker he forgot to remove before locker-cleaning day) or for selling drugs on campus (mostly MDMA/weed).

One anecdote: On a weekend, a friend of mine traded or sold his paintball gun to a classmate. They made the mistake of making the exchange in the school parking lot. A concerned parent followed them home and called the police on them. He is arrested because it is a gun-like object on school property, despite the fact that it is not a gun and he has no intention of shooting up a school.

I'm watching your link now. That's sad: the oldest son stopped asking about going to school alone.

how old are you and did you go through the American public school system? From 7th grade on up our lockers were randomly searched by police and K9 dogs walked through the school parking lot. I'm not saying they have no right to do that, but it was pretty routine for the police to be involved. My high school had less than 200 pupils.

Media? I can see it with my own eyes- the lack of children outside without their parents is obvious.

Sure, baby carriers have been used throughout the world long before strollers were invented. But the recent resurgence in the west is driven by the popularity of attachment parenting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babywearing.

I think there's a simpler explanation: observation bias.

30 years ago there was more crime, but if it didn't happen in your town or to someone you knew, you were pretty unlikely to hear about it. Now, there's less crime but we're orders of magnitude more likely to hear about it.

IMO, this is a side-effect of 24-hour news networks and social media needing something to fill the dead air.

The parent comment may have been using colorful idiomatic phrasing to advocate for non-violent verbal engagement.

I remember being left alone in the car at 7 or 8. If it was too hot I would have opened the window, or in extreme cases, stepped outside for some time.

A reasonable concern in Phoenix with a child locked in a car seat.

We aren't in Phoenix and the kids could get in and out on their own.

.... so NO.

But why would you? I know of incidents just this year that a child was saved because of amber alerts. It's put out for the same reason that people on here are arguing for "if your surrounding community were more aware or had a personal interest in each other, these situations would not happen"

The only times I got these alerts was when I'm asleep. I have no idea how I could be of help to a search party while still groggy. So off they go.

Yeah, it's kind of the whole point of the article.

I think, "What are the odds that I am the guy who sees the car in the description and remembers the license plate number and calls the police and the child is saved." Then I think, "But if it were my child, I'd want every smart phone on the planet turned on." So I leave it on and endure the anxiety, and keep my eyes open, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be that guy.

without moral guilt?

While I detest Trump and authoritarians in general (which Hillary is really just a different flavor of), I don't think you're statement holds water here. California, where I live, is the ultimate nanny state - we've criminalized the everloving shit out of everything. California has 3x as many laws on the books than the next closest state in volume, and it makes many activities, business and personal, very complex.

'Progressive' ideology places the State in greater and greater control over defining most aspects of life, and tends to turn to law and mandates more frequently than other ideological systems. This naturally drives the use of state mechanisms as a means of operation and resolution over non-legal communal resolution between individuals.

> Never mind the more than 500 people a year that are murdered in NYC and another 500 in Chicago every single year.

    It's a war going on outside we ain't safe from
    I feel the pain in my city wherever I go
    314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago

- K. West

More than 500 murders a year in NYC is untrue.

A whole lot of people tell you to avoid NYC because it's "dangerous."

Exactly, but most people don't know it, and even if some know it on an intellectual level, they don't really internalize it on a practical level.

See also TSA and terrorism, etc.

I think it might be more other bicyclists, some people are extremely vehement that everyone needs to be wearing a helmet, while others consider that a gross infringement on their rights.

I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I wear a helmet myself, most of the time, and using one seems to make sense. I don't bother with a helmet if it's a short trip on tame roads, such as the 1/2 mile from my house to the grocery store. On the other hand, I can't point you to supporting evidence for a benefit to making helmets mandatory.

I used to be pretty neutral on this subject, I personally wear the helmet and religiously follow signs on the bike, and can't care less if someone wants to kill themselves against my car. Until I witnessed the so-called "gold standard" bay area cyclist, which run the red light against traffic, without a light, in the dark and not wearing a helmet. He ended up in a pretty bad shape, though okay overall. The one who needed help was the lady in the car in front of me who hit this idiot and sent him flying. And then I changed my mind about helmets and stop signs and everything. It's not just your business if you want to commit suicide using somebody's else's car. The person behind the wheel of this car might not be prepared to kill the idiot today. Because even the idiots are human beings, or so these people think.

For instance, web forum threads about the necessity of wearing helmets will almost instantly turn into flame wars. Likewise, if you admit to rolling through stop signs, you will get attacked, even though most cyclists and car drivers roll through stop signs.

It takes more than 5 seconds for an infant to climb a gorilla cage fence.

Most people value (some) animal life above human life. Could be because nature is sold as an innocent paradise free from sin, or that every animal is the noblest creature on Earth or just because we all have experience with assholes, while our only experiences with animals are them being majestic on the National Geographic Channel. Try giving people the trolley problem with 5 golden retrievers and one adult human male.

Edit: or as one internet meme put it:

A child has fallen in the gorilla enclosure. You hold a gun with one bullet and you can choose to shoot the gorilla to save the child. If you do so, he will make national headlines and lead to discussions that question our morality. If you don't, the child might will be rescued and the gorilla will live out his days in peace in the gorilla enclosure, completely unknown to the world. He will not be as famous. In the end, what do we value more: Harambe or the idea of Harambe?

Because the gorilla had no choice, he was a prisoner put there for the amusement of tourists.