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Comment by bruce343434 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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