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.
https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
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.
And, did a follow up on exactly what you're talking about, although points out that their results differ from some other analysis: https://freakonomics.com/2005/07/09/more-evidence-on-car-sea...
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.
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
But when it comes to driving it doesn't really matter much because half the accidents involving two cars are someone else's fault.
We need to look out for each other. Nobody is perfect, but the better each individual does the better the whole is.
I asked out of genuine curiosity, so I hope I didn’t seem standoffish.
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.
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'.
https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/doyle-levitt%...
And here’s a pretty entertaining TED talk he gave:
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 . . .
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.
Yes, but I think this figure was proposed in order to be contrasted with the reduction of 8,000 births that same year.
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.
It is not a plus, because in the US there is no need to control births. To the contrary, there are not enough births.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Protecting nature is not a market force so you need some other mechanism for that.
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.
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.
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."
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/child_passenger_safet...
So about 440 children died while buckled up. Suddenly 57 doesn't seem like such a bad number.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Perhaps we should extend the lockdowns indefinitely; think of the children!
Places like Germany can afford to prevent anyone from getting a vehicle that isn’t capable because of public transportation.
If you prevent a rural American from driving, that is a wholly different situation.
73% reduction in death rate, but also 0.95 percentage point reduction.
> 50% chance of being ugly?
No, a less than 50% chance of a condition that can (but does not always) produce ugliness.
If the same number of deaths happened at an annual event, it would be major news headlines.
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.
I would guess it’s non-zero when talking in the scale of hundreds of millions of children.
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.
> 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.
Anecdotally it's most strongly driven by "competition" with cars:
- Small city -> Not that much traffic -> No helments
- Big city with lacking bike infrastructure/no strong biking culture -> A lot of close encounters with cars -> Helmets
- Big city with established biking culture -> No helmets
If you mean sport biking (race, mountainbike, long distance), then you are right that I didn't consider those.
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.
Italian, not too bad on Google translate:
https://www.automobile.it/magazine/burocrazia/seggiolino-ant...
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.
For instance, it's common for Europeans not to wear bicycle helmets.
That doesn't hold for the UK. Maybe it's spreading.
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.
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?
So you haven't read the article but you think it's wrong, huh?
Well, good news: just clear your cookies and 'Open PDF in browser' gives you the paper, no sign up or payment needed.