On Car Seats as Contraception | Hacker News Reader

On Car Seats as Contraception

thezvi.substack.com

24 pointstikkun20 comments

Some considerations:

1) We prioritize the lives and minds that are here over potential lives. Letting a child die so he can have more classmates to mourn him seems perverse.

2) As with many relaxed regulations, I suspect that it will result in disparate negative impact to poor people. (I only skimmed the article; feel free to call me out if this is addressed).

3) This is American Bizarro World where the answer to, "Families can't have kids because they can't transport them," is, "Let some of the kids die in vehicular accidents," instead of, "Build public transit that is both safer for all involved and also allows any number of familial transit configurations, including 'mom and dad and like 8 kids' and 'a smaller 10-year-old who would be otherwise relegated to a car seat able to travel alone.'"

> We prioritize the lives and minds that are here over potential lives.

Sure, but that fails to consider the context and the broader point of living. The point of living isn't to maximize safety at all costs and sacrifice everything else at its altar. The context is that declining birth rates are a major problem, so if it were the case that car seats dramatically affect birth rates, this is an important thing to consider. The bit about letting children die and mourning is an empty appeal to emotion that I will justifiably ignore.

> As with many relaxed regulations, I suspect that it will result in disparate negative impact to poor people.

And you didn't specify why. Why would this negatively impact the poor? Blanket statements that appeal to emotionally charged subjects like the poor are don't contribute any substance. The author points to the cost of car seats. They're not cheap. Having to buy them certainly affects the poor. Now you have less money for your kids, or you're being coerced into having less than the rich because you cannot afford a larger car.

> Build public transit that is both safer for all involved and also allows any number of familial transit configurations.

I agree that there is underinvestment in public transportation in the US, but once again, you'll handwaving and speaking from a position that's disconnected from reality as it is. The US isn't going to suddenly build up a huge base of public infrastructure. The urban planning and "rhythms of life" dosn't even accommodate this possibility easily. And even in Europe, where public transportation is much better, people living in rural or suburban areas don't necessarily have great access to public transportation. Furthermore, have you tried shuffling a bunch of kids around by public transportation? You want to carry all the stuff they might need? Even people in cities find cars a huge help in those cases.

If car seat laws are indeed a major contributing factor to plummeting birth rates, then it makes sense to consider repealing them, especially if car seats don't provide any real safety[0]. Or if we can change car seat belts to accommodate the very young in a way that doesn't require car seats (and where more children can be fitted in the back seat), that, too, would be great.

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/child-safety-car-seats/...

As GP said, Minivan and compact SUVs are similarly priced. Yet the populace chooses the former. If being forced to drive a minivan makes parents choose not to have a 3rd child, then it's really not about car seats it's such a minor inconvenience. Deregulation fan is just arguing for deregulation here, I doubt we'd see a marked increase in fertility rates from this.

There's a lot more to consider. How many bedrooms does your house have? Are your kids gonna share? Bathrooms? Fridge space? Can they afford 20+% extra food budget, clothing? Time to take 3 kids to extracurriculars? Summer camps cost more. Do they like to travel, that extra kid is another full seat at the age they consider nixing child seats. More kids are much more inconvenient, it's just a fact.

Besides, there are several 3-across car seat options that can be found with just a tad bit of research. We can fit 3 kids spanning 5y age diff into the back of our compact e-Golf.

So car seats cause 1 in 1000 fewer births of third children because minivans are uncool.

And because 2 year olds don’t get hurt THAT bad in car accidents, we should eliminate car seat requirements so the population can grow even faster.

Are there any schools of economics that actually consider sustainability, or are they all pretty much “growth good, more growth even better?”

As a side note, I find that people who have never installed a car seat often underestimate how large they are (sometimes very confidently and emphatically, as parents just go, oh, this person is clueless). We have a Subaru crosstrek, a common “crossover” in these parts, and I had to return the first convertible seat I bought because it didn’t fit, and the current one is, well, ok. Would like to move my passenger seat a click back when I’m in it, but better than the infant seat, where we just said, oh well, the passenger can just sit in the back behind the driver.

One observation about cars that wasn’t mentioned in the article: modern cars don’t seem particularly well adapted to people with non-average upper body height. There are plenty of cars where even slightly tall people don’t comfortably fit in the back seat (cough, Prius), but I can’t think of many recent cars at all where short people (e.g. kids) are well accommodated by the seatbelt. Putting a three year old in a modern car without some form of car seat or belt position device seems rather absurd, especially on a longer drive. (Ignore their risk of death — they are likely to have the seatbelt right over their nose, which is uncomfortable to say the least.)

In contrast, I distinctly remember the cars I rode in a a kid having adjustable shoulder belt positions, especially in the front seat.

So maybe regulators should nudge cars makers toward making cars that small people actually fit in without adding extra gadgets? It’s not rocket science, and there are multiple designs that work.

>It is often said that governments can do little to increase the birth rate. I find this implausible.

What's implausible about it? It's very easy for me to burn my house down, a match and some lighter fluid should do the trick. I've never learnt the trick of unburning it down. Some effects are "one-way". They're ratchets.

The theory that is presented only applies to the United States. But governments throughout the world are struggling with falling (plummeting, really) fertility rates, and not all of them have the same irritating car seat laws.

I believe that most people would agree that anti-smoking campaigns (through television commercials and media advertisements mostly) work, and there is a measurable reduction in smoking behavior. What most people would be surprised at is that there is another campaign, at least as effective as and maybe moreso, that discourages procreation. Every standup comedian for the past 50 years, every sitcom, every NYT article telling everyone how they need $1 million per child to raise them to adulthood. Certainly this particular campaign isn't deliberate like the other, but it still exists. It may be so that because it isn't deliberate and that there is no one person or organization causing it, that it may be impossible to turn off.

I do not have this square on my human extinction bingo card.

TLDR: it's harder to have more kids when the law demands we keep them safe to a certain standard when children ride in cars. Car seats take up more space than children. This is a financial pressure against larger families.

If your problem is low birth rates in America, sure, car seat laws are a small but measurable and possibly easily-remedied contributor to said problem. But really that's one of like a thousand things[0] including car culture generally. Trains, light rail, and busses don't add that pressure, and bikes are cheap.

[0] TFA mentions a bunch of other pressures, but that list is certainly non-exhaustive, and seems very facile, tbh.

> Trains, light rail, and busses don't add that pressure, and bikes are cheap

Are you suggesting taking 3 kids to the grocery store on your bicycle?

No country that relies on trains or light rail for default transit has a TFR over 2.

As a non native speaker I had some serious trouble parsing the first few paragraphs. What is his point? Can someone translate? Car seat requirements are the cause of people not having kids?

Yes, he's talking about a study that showed that car seat requirements decrease birth rates because most cars cannot fit more than two car seats in them at one time. The hypothesis is that this causes families to avoid having a third child, and the author is arguing that we should eliminate car seat requirements, or perhaps make them required only for children age two or younger.

Right now in many US states, car seats are required until the age of 12.

Yes, car seat requirements, which are increasingly detached from reality, measurably decrease the rate at which families have a third child (because many cars cannot fit 3 seats across).

If you keep going, the argument is that car seat requirements stop ppl from having a 3rd kid - you can only fit 2 car seats in the back of a car, while you could fit 3 kids without car seats.

I didn’t read beyond that, as it’s an extremely long/rambling piece, but that does make sense - many people need to have all their kids in the car at once, and can’t afford a minivan or some such thing.

Basically, dropping fertility and birth rates are a problem. The author argues that government policies and laws can frustrate birth rates and perversely disincentivize having more children. The example he uses are car seats. Because you cannot fit more than two car seats in a car, and because they're not cheap, this creates a disincentive to have more children. According to the author, an argument from safety fall flat when one compares the number of children saved by car seats to the ones that are never born in the first place, but by his estimates could have been born. Ergo, get rid of child car seat laws if you want to encourage higher birth rates. The author is not arguing that this is the only reason why birth rates have declined, but one contributing factor.

Your problem isn't because you are a non native speaker. I'm a native speaker and struggled to understand their point. They need to write in a more concise manner.

I am a native English speaker and I’m struggling a bit as well to understand his point.

But I believe you are correct in that reducing requirements for car seats could increase the number of kids people have.

(I was not allowed to reply to your post)

You have to wait a moment after a post is made before the reply link will appear.

Ah! Thank you. I’d not had this happen before.

All I could think of reading through the comments here is the family of four I saw hanging off a motorbike in Mumbai traffic... and it was normal.

When you know your hour of HN is over without looking at the clock.

/facepalm

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