21 ms·

Car seats as contraception

377 points by longdefeat 6y ago

Negitivefrags 6y ago
"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.
- kazinator 6y ago
  > 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.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    It’s extremely common for Americans to not wear bicycle helmets.
    - pletnes 6y ago
      Since they don’t bicycle, you mean?
      - kortilla 6y ago
        No, the ones that do bicycle frequently don’t wear helmets. The percentage varies widely based on city.
        deathgrips 6y ago
        Yes, they just need to magically shrink the distances between cities
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - hobofan 6y ago
      I'm not sure if there is a big cultural divided regarding wearing helmets for safety reasons. 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
      - IncRnd 6y ago
        I think you have an inherent bias in your examples. There are bike riders outside of cities.
        hobofan 6y ago
        If you mean rural travel between small cities/towns, that's what I head in mind too with the first example (as that's the setting I grew up in). If you mean sport biking (race, mountainbike, long distance), then you are right that I didn't consider those.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Oricle 6y ago
      So what! Fucking good goyhim you idiots are
  - cs02rm0 6y ago
    No, I think just America. Europe isn't so safety crazed. For instance, it's common for Europeans not to wear bicycle helmets. That doesn't hold for the UK. Maybe it's spreading.
    - Thlom 6y ago
      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.
      - toyg 6y ago
        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...
        pja 6y ago
        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.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    > > 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.
  - PaulAJ 6y ago
    Actually we just focus our efforts on making sure everyone has potable water.
  - jaclaz 6y ago
    >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. Italian, not too bad on Google translate: https://www.automobile.it/magazine/burocrazia/seggiolino-anti-abbandono-6905 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.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  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.
  - soperj 6y ago
    No, you just need to drive less.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Drive less, train more, stop buying huge SUVs, improve traffic laws…there’s a lot we could be doing.
    - reallydontask 6y ago
      why not both?
    - Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
      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.
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        I wonder what would happen if you normalized by SAT/ACT score (or something that stands in for education level). 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.
- smarnach 6y ago
  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.
  - freetime2 6y ago
    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.
    - lcrz 6y ago
      So a pretty minor inconvenience, got it.
    - drawfloat 6y ago
      That's clearly a minor inconvenience.
      - freetime2 6y ago
        Out of curiosity, have you had the experience?
    - el_benhameen 6y ago
      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?
      - himlion 6y ago
        When I don't plan to do more than 50 miles of driving on one side, I would definitely not bring them if there wasn't a legal requirement.
        6y ago
- toyg 6y ago
  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.
  - Taek 6y ago
    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.
    - redisman 6y ago
      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.
      - Taek 6y ago
        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.
        imtringued 6y ago
- wastra 6y ago
  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?
  - michaelt 6y ago
    > As I won't pay Elsevier to read this article, I can't evaluate the (likely) methodolgical failings. 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.
    - wastra 6y ago
      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.
- lcrz 6y ago
  "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." https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/child_passenger_safety/cps-factsheet.html 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.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    > 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?
    - bbarn 6y ago
      Wouldn't a five point harness be safer for everyone, adults included?
      - curlypaul924 6y ago
        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.
- redgc 6y ago
  Presumably if ~57 would have been fatal then there's also a lot of serious non-fatal injuries too
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Not necessarily, if the distribution has a sufficiently long tail then there might not be all that many cases between 'minor injuries' and 'fatal'.
- Arnt 6y ago
  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.
  - himlion 6y ago
    I recently read that the number is €2.6 million euro for the Netherlands.
  - dash2 6y ago
    You might be optimistic to think that car safety regulation is designed so as to maximise consumer welfare. See eg https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.3.233 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.3.233
  - onemiketwelve 6y ago
    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-vs-the-economy 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.
- mola 6y ago
  "a problem" 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?
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    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.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    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.
    - yohannparis 6y ago
      Immigrations is a viable and already available response to this problem. Unfortunately most western countries are not willing to embrace it.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  That's... a lot of deaths, and a lot of grieving families. If the same number of deaths happened at an annual event, it would be major news headlines.
  - donatj 6y ago
    At the same time, it leads you to wonder how many deaths were caused as as direct and indirect result of the seats and their associated costs. I would guess it’s non-zero when talking in the scale of hundreds of millions of children.
    - learnstats2 6y ago
      If you guess it's non-zero, can you identify one such case?
  - greenshackle2 6y ago
    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.
- kkielhofner 6y ago
  57 deaths isn't a lot (in statistical terms) but this figure reminds me of the missing bullet holes: https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d 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.
  - jwalton 6y ago
    Freakonomics did a good Ted Talk about why we probably don't need car seats for kids who are 7: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_about_child_carseats https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo... 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-seats-vs-seat-belts/ https://freakonomics.com/2005/07/09/more-evidence-on-car-sea...
  - davidsolomon 6y ago
    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.
- k2enemy 6y ago
  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.
- tyxodiwktis 6y ago
  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?
  - lucasmullens 6y ago
    Are you really under the impression half of everyone is ugly because they slept on their backs?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 0.1% reduction in death rate 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.
  - LasEspuelas 6y ago
    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.
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    Do you have a cite for that 47% figure?
glouwbug 6y ago
I mean, it doesn't take a car seat to tell you kids are expensive. You're saving 50% on child care costs already by not having a third child
- recursive 6y ago
  50%? I can't come up with any remotely plausible formula that gives anything too far from ~33%.
  - hervature 6y ago
    I think it's 2*1.5 = 3 (3rd kid is 50% more expensive)
    - recursive 6y ago
      Ok, I can imagine how "avoiding a 50% increase" could be construed as "saving 50%".
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - glouwbug 6y ago
    If only the cost of having children were linear
    - recursive 6y ago
      In my experience, it seems to be sub-linear. Subsequent ones don't require all new everything.
      - imhoguy 6y ago
        That depends on gender and age difference with sibilings.
whoisninja 6y ago
ok by that logic you could also say cars were the original contraception because not more than 3 kids can fit even without car seats lol
- willvarfar 6y ago
  Seats used to be benches and those that didn't fit in a seat sat on knees or in the back.
  - whoisninja 6y ago
    ok then the move from benches to seats become the real contraceptive, well played bro lol
- whoisninja 6y ago
  guess what my 1br apartment is also a contraceptive
gpapilion 6y ago
I think about the marginal safety improvement vs the economic costs of car seats a lot since having kids. The biggest improvement, the initial car seat laws probably made things better. At some point though it has direct costs with things like booster seats running until kids are big enough (probably 3rd or 4th grade), and indirect cost like you may have to miss work because you can’t have someone without a seat pick the kid up. All in all it’s different than it was 30 years ago, and more expensive to do relatively mundane tasks with your kids.
- scrapcode 6y ago
  Great point. With everything going on in the world and myself being a new father, I've recently reflected on the costs of these as well. We were gifted a "base" so that I can keep one in my vehicle and my wife can have one in hers, but it expires in a few months. These things are expensive and lower income people often have to make due. Expiration dates / enforcement (if such a thing) add one more thing lower income families are forced to break the rules on.
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    Get a 360 degree seat once you outgrow the capsule... IMHO seats are not expensive. We've got one of the best one and spread over 4.5 years it's half of what nappies cost.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  What (dollars:life) value do you think is the cutoff point? I wonder what the dollars:life cutoff value is across various policies, using (marginal safety improvement:the economic costs) to calculate it.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Here’s the EPA’s take, that a life is worth $7.4M: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-valuation#whatvalue https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...
peterburkimsher 6y ago
This is a research paper proposing a causal link between child seat regulations and family size. It is not about procreation in cars, such as the song by Cake - Stick Shifts and Safety Belts. "I need you to be here with me, Not way over in a bucket seat. But when we're driving in my Malibu, It's easy to get right next to you."
- hinkley 6y ago
  Do you remember bench seats in cars? I think that song might be a little more literal than you’re assuming.
  - anon73044 6y ago
    >Do you remember bench seats in cars? Still available in full size trucks, more likely to be found in fleet work trucks though. 5 minutes of googling tells me the 2013 Impala was the probably the last car sold with a front bench option. I would have guessed it would be that or a Crown Vic.
ponker 6y ago
I see that the effect is concentrated in households with a car, but I wonder how much of this is due to the car seats themselves, and how much is due to the vast array of things designed for a “family of 4.” Restaurants take twice as long to seat a table of 5 vs. 4, venues have policies like “one free child per adult,” etc.... when we became a family of 5 everything immediately got much higher-friction. And we knew it was going to happen, and strongly considered not having a third kid because of it. Interestingly we are now considering a fourth kid because we’ve already eaten the cost of going to this high-friction lifestyle like getting the minivan.
echelon 6y ago
Speaking of fertility, we need to provide stimulus and incentives to encourage more childbirth. We also need to become more pro-immigration. America won't be the top consumer economy for much longer, and we won't be producing the same volume of talent.
- jariel 6y ago
  "America won't be the top consumer economy" - this is not a race worth trying to win. It's better to figure out 'quality' over 'quantity' now, and get with the 21st century.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > this is not a race worth trying to win Earnestly, why not? Edit with my concerns: America is still a bastion of personal liberty. I'd shudder to think of a world where something else throws around all the weight. We're already censoring American entertainment to appease the juggernauts in the search of profit. I don't think the coming world will be comfortable.
    - andykx 6y ago
      Other first world (mainly European) countries are, in general, far happier than we are, despite having significantly smaller consumer economies. Why is that? Edit: America is only a bastion of personal liberty if you look and act a certain way. Is personal liberty such an important thing anyway? It seems to be creating huge problems for us at the moment. I am not an advocate for an entirely collectivist society, but I think a small dose of collectivism would help us all. People refuse to acknowledge the benefits they get from our society without wanting to play their part by paying taxes.
      - klipt 6y ago
        Probably because they spend less on the military and more on their people. But would they be able to do that if they couldn't rely on US protection via NATO? If the US suddenly disappeared, would Europe be ripe for invasion by, say, Russia?
jacobn 6y ago
The increase in car seat requirements and sizes has probably also contributed to the shifting of consumer demand toward larger and larger vehicles. Which has a host of economic and environmental consequences beyond the number of children.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  Larger vehicles also lead to deadlier collisions. Rarely is anything a pure universal good with no tradeoffs.
foreigner 6y ago
LOL they forgot to factor in how many kids are conceived in the back seat of a car!
- sudhirj 6y ago
  Yeah, I came in here thinking this was about seat law changes leading to less conception in cars.
- jabl 6y ago
  Awkward to do if the back seat row is filled with child seats.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I’d say it’s more awkward when the row is filled with children…
- zwayhowder 6y ago
  I had assumed that it was an article about bucket seats precipitating a drop in in-car conception. (Ala Cake's song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zip4QyJyD5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zip4QyJyD5g )
scotty79 6y ago
I can't imagine how could you filter out all other things that correlate with number and age of children, presence of a male and likelyhood of having a third child and reproductive preferences evolution in time and car safety rules evolution in time.
bartkappenburg 6y ago
Here’s an interesting twelve year old TED talk on car seat economics from Steven Levitt (freakonomics): https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0 https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0
pkage 6y ago
I read through the underlying paper, and I don't quite understand their methodology. It seems like they're taking a bucketload of demographic information and then trying to control for every other possible factor that could affect fertility rates to isolate the effect of car seat laws. I'm skeptical that it's even possible to control for all of those variables. Even assuming that they perfectly model the factors they do account for, it's perfectly possible that there are more underlying factors. Additionally, interpreting the results as t-statistics doesn't really tell us very much, as the variation between model and reality could easily be noise from the control variables rather than from a relationship between car seat laws and fertility. I'm not saying the paper doesn't have any merit at all--I think the idea is quite interesting. I am just skeptical of inferring anything from the results, given that the methodology is very poorly described (and is so error-prone).
- 7MinOfTerror 6y ago
  If you don't understand their methodology, you probably shouldn't be attempting to critique it. Why is it that internet forum commenters think they're qualified to examine the work of professional researchers who have spent years if not decades studying in their field? Edit: y'all are totally right, apparently a teenager who hasn't even completed their bachelors (in AI/CompSci) is qualified to read a public health research paper because they "demonstrate an understanding of statistics." This is functionally indistinguishable from mothers who jump on the internet and think they can read, interpret, and critique research papers on vaccines. "THIS PAPER DOESN'T CONSIDER THAT MERCURY IS TOXIC!!!"
  - sideshowb 6y ago
    The rest of gp's post exhibits good understanding of statistics. I suspect they're actually more qualified than "internet forum commentator". And it's good to be honest about what you do/don't understand, the fault could be in the explanation...
    - 7MinOfTerror 6y ago
      Understanding statistics does not mean you understand science or public health or research. "It wasn't explained to me, therefore it is invalid" is not valid.
dwg 6y ago
> We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000 Ironic... but a would-be birth vs. loss of life in an accident are immeasurably different things; incomparable. As an slightly off-topic aside, I live in a rural area of Japan where, in my experience, most kids ride without car seats. In fact, small children around 3 to 6 often don't use seatbelts, instead standing between the seats or sit on an adults lap. There is a apparently a child seat law, but it seems a large number of people ignore it. I think the big reason is a lower accident rate, due to more careful driving.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Yes the authors here really sound like this is an argument to relax the car seat age, but that sounds like a ridiculous argument to me. Do you think we should kill this random child if it would lead to (8000/57) = 104 families who can't afford a minivan to decide to have a third kid?
  - samcheng 6y ago
    It's just an insightful paper of an effect, well-proven and thought provoking. I don't think they are advocating for fewer car seats.
  - Thlom 6y ago
    On the other hand, how many kids are killed by huge SUV's bought to fit the third child seat where the driver can't see a children in front of their car?
  - lrem 6y ago
    "Kill" is a very strong exaggeration though. Pretty much all the proper research I've ever stumbled upon claimed no measurable effect of child car seats or booster seats over the age of 8. First hit from Google today: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180105124030.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180105124030.h...
alexchamberlain 6y ago
My first child is 5 and a half months old. Our limiting factors are required sleep and lack of boot (trunk?) space...
cs02rm0 6y ago
I had one child and then twins, so I felt like I was just dropped into this. I was pretty shocked turning up with car seats at a Mercedes dealership to find we couldn't get three of them across an E class even without using ISOFIX. IIRC it was slightly exacerbated by two of them being seats for babies. FWIW we went with a Volvo V70. We didn't want an MPV or SUV.
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  I also thought I didn’t want an MPV. Then I bought one and have never been so happy about a car. They have such a terrible reputation but they are so practical with kids.
- jabl 6y ago
  > I had one child and then twins, so I felt like I was just dropped into this. Same. > FWIW we went with a Volvo V70. We didn't want an MPV or SUV. I've been happy with a "Compact MPV" (which I think is what the class is called). Currently Toyota Verso, previously VW Touran. Both fit 3 child seats in the rear. But it seems the compact MPV class is on its way out (e.g. Toyota doesn't produce the Verso anymore), everybody for some unexplainable reason wants a SUV nowadays.
  - the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
    The SUV trend for families is a weird one. I tried so many and they are mostly just large on the outside. And they don’t drive much fun either.
    - raegis 6y ago
      I have three children, and our solution was the Honda Odyssey. It has a separate back middle seat with its own pair of car seat anchors. Yes, it's big on the inside. None of the other SUVs I saw had the middle seat anchors.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      > The SUV trend for families is a weird one. I once heard SUVs described as station wagons for people who didn't want to admit they'd turned into their parents.
madmax108 6y ago
I genuinely thought the article would be a study that concluded "You are less likely to get pregnant copulating in the backseat of your car as opposed to your bed" or something similar, and if it were, it would be a great nominee for an ignobel [1] But damn, this paper was not about that but about car economics implications that follow having a third child :P [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
dnhz 6y ago
What about paying to send three kids to college at about the same time versus two? Couldn't that be as big a consideration as the physical limits for fitting car seats into a car?
- subroutine 6y ago
  You are basically saying that having 3 kids is more expensive than having 2 kids, which is more expensive than having 1 kid... and that people take the extra cost into consideration before having a kid. Indeed, they do, obviously. In many ways having a kid is quite a potent contraceptive (for having another kid). https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-families-in-the-us-by-number-of-children/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-familie...
  - cjg 6y ago
    That chart is highly confusing. For example, if a family has three children spaced 2 years apart, they would only contribute to the three children part of the plot for just over half the time that they contribute to something other than no children part of the plot.
    - subroutine 6y ago
      You are right. Good catch.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  If you're under financial aid thresholds that often doesn't matter. The financial aid formulas (at least when I went to college, overlapping with my sister for 3 out of the 4 years) were that the college figured out an expected family contribution, it was split between the number of kids enrolled that year, and then the college makes up the difference with financial aid. My sister's tuition dropped by half when I entered college.
andi999 6y ago
I thought before reading it it is about male infertility because of seat heating... But pray tell me, is it true that three child seat do not fit on the back bench of a typical US car? I find this hard to believe. Btw are kids allowed to sit on the shotgun seat in front?
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Kids are not supposed to sit in the front seat. Every vehicle I've been in has a large warning label on the sun visor that states that children under 13 (I think) shouldn't sit in the front seat due to the danger caused by the airbag. I have also seen some vans that allow you to disable the passenger airbag with the ignition key in a keyhole in the dashboard. I don't know if it's safe for kids in that case though.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Here basically all cars can switch off the airbag. So how do you do it if you drive with your 6 month old? Crying alone in the back? (Of course with two parents one is probably sitting in the back)
    - rimliu 6y ago
      If you cannot drive with a kid in the back, you cannot drive at all, because it means your attention is on the kid, not the driving. We had no problem driving with the kid in the back, no matter the age.
      - andi999 6y ago
        In the US you mean? Kid is probably quieter if can see the parent closer.
        frosted-flakes 6y ago
        Some parents might let their ten year old sit in the front, but I have never seen a car seat there, and it's made pretty clear that car seats always go in the back. In most cars you can reach back and comfort them with one hand, while still keeping your eyes on the road. Otherwise you stop, or let them cry.
sayrer 6y ago
A Hacker News account might be a more effective method.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I doubt it. If I had to guess, the majority of people on Hacker News probably have at least one child.
  - sayrer 6y ago
    Hmm, I haven't seen any data on that. But your comment does seem to be representative of HN, so you could be right.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I think in general most people just have children. Hacker News may skew mildly away from this but even at say a typical software company I suspect most employees are parents.
burlesona 6y ago
Anecdotally this rings very true for me. Dealing with car seats is one of the most annoying and cumbersome issues of being a parent in the US. However I will also say, for the sake of other parents who may be in a similar boat: Diono Radian carseats fit 3 across in our Mazda 3, which isn't exactly a big car. So if you find the right seat, you can make it work. The biggest problem is the infant period where they have to face backwards. For that we went with a Cybex Aton 2, which was sufficiently "vertical" that the front seat passenger could sit comfortably. Everything else we tried required the front seat to be shoved way too far forward.
- MandieD 6y ago
  The Joie i-Snug 2 is the one infant seat with a snap-in base we found that would fit in our 2008 Ford Fiesta and allow me (1.65m) to sit comfortably in the front passenger seat. My husband (1.85m) can fit in that seat, but we’re not sure how great that’s going to be for long drives where we need to switch drivers. We’re in Germany, which appears to have similar car seat rules to the US, along with increasingly large cars, but without home or public garages that are growing at the same rate. I’d like to replace the Fiesta with a hybrid Corolla wagon, but the current model is 5cm too long for our garage from the 80s.
phreeza 6y ago
Reminds me of the birth interval in hunter-gatherers vs. farming people in prehistory. Hunter-gatherers were supposedly constrained in their birth spacing by the need to carry their infants when roaming around, while farmers had no such constraint and were thus able to out-reproduce hunter-gatherers.
- igor47 6y ago
  oh, interesting. do you have a source?
  - phreeza 6y ago
    I think I read it in a Jared Diamond book, but here it is in an interview with him: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P8054.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P8054... (page 5)
- oceanofsolaris 6y ago
  I would imagine that the amount of available calories is overall the larger influence on which society grows and which doesn't. Remember that in most hunter-gatherer and farming societies, population stayed constant despite high birth numbers.
  - phreeza 6y ago
    This is kind of mentioned in the interview I posted in the sibling reply, but I could imagine that this mainly drives down the density, but not so much the rate of growth. The reason is that grown individuals can actually usually feed themselves by roaming. What is hard is achieving a caloric surplus, which is why there is little specialisation and social stratification.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Also, hunter-gatherers supposedly breast fed for up to 4 years, which also tends to space children. The invention and marketing of ‘formula being better than breastmilk’ is what truly shot up the number of children per family 100 years ago.
irrational 6y ago
Huh. We have seven kids. This didn't play at all into our decision on how many kids to have. Though, they were spaced out far enough that the older ones were aging out of car seats before the younger ones needed them. I don't think we ever had more than 2 kids in a carseat and 1 kid in a booster seat. We are down to 1 kid in a booster seat and the three oldest driving cars on their own now.
- subroutine 6y ago
  Your personal anecdote would be, more or less, consistent with their findings... "there are no significant differences in birth rates when a woman has two children where just one requires a carseat." That said, I don't think this is anything more than a correlation; not even a strong correlation (requiring many caveats, controls, and cofactors), and to me that effect size seems nominal.
kleiba 6y ago
We looked around for quite some time before we found a car that fits three car seats in the back. (Mind you, we're talking European cars here, there's a chance our options would have been greater in North America.) However, it only took us a little longer because we weren't keen on a (mini) van -- had we considered vans too, there would have been a lot more options, and they're often even more affordable than other types of (spacious) cars. I understand that not everyone can afford to go out and buy a new car -- but if that is in your way of having more children, I'd say the reason was not the car seat requirement but cost considerations. And I think that's very much a reasonable consideration. I don't buy the "only 57 child deaths" argument - besides obviously being ethically questionable, deaths is not the only thing you want to prevent: how about (severe) non-lethal injuries? The reason car seats are mandatory (and regulated, too) is not because there is a strong car seat lobby but because of the merits they provide. For instance, buckling up a child that isn't tall enough yet bears the risk of getting the belt wrapped around their neck instead of across their chest which in case of an impact is certainly not what you want. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to find the narrative of this paper questionable. Being a parent myself, I find it very hard to imagine a couple going: "Oh, we would so love to have a third child if it wasn't for that dang car seat problem..." Not that it's completely inconceivable but, I mean, come on...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Excellent word choice on that last sentence ;)
- bbarn 6y ago
  I think your point of "cost considerations" is at the heart of what bothers me about this paper. The laws about seatbelts, car seats, etc. came at the same time as a general sense of more parental responsibility as a whole. A few decades earlier the cost of additional children was much lower in every way.
- ziotom78 6y ago
  > Being a parent myself, I find it very hard to imagine a couple going: "Oh, we would so love to have a third child if it wasn't for that dang car seat problem..." Not that it's completely inconceivable but, I mean, come on... I and my wife have three children, and a few years ago we seriously considered having another one. There were several factors that led us to give up with this idea (moving to a larger house, increased tuition costs, etc.), but surely the act of buying a larger car was something we listed among the cons, and it played a non-negligible role in our final decision.
globular-toast 6y ago
What is the age that children are required to be in a car seat? My parents had five children and I don't think they ever even owned two car seats at one time, but they did have a booster seat.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Weirdly have they controlled for a 3rd child as opposed to +1 child? The world (in the West, UK, ok ok not world but you know what i mean), is arrayed against a third child - to get three car seats in the back seat of a car (with ISO fix) you jump up to a new more expensive range of cars. Hotel rooms - book a double room with 2 adults and 2 kids is fine, with a third (non baby) and you have to (fire regulations) book 2 rooms, and have an adult in each room. All sorts of weird things pop up. None of which are conducive to the production of another child ...
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  "Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, ..." Right there in the abstract.
- jleahy 6y ago
  The UK is pragmatic, if you have more than two children (and all except the youngest two are over 3) then you only need to put the youngest two in car seats. They know you can’t easily fit a third one. Seems very reasonable.
lkramer 6y ago
Just to be clear, this is a positive, right? Smaller cars = less environmental impact, less children = less environmental impact. Win/win...
christophilus 6y ago
I’d take it a step further and say that the car is contraceptive. Kids are much less stressful in a pedestrian-friendly setting. I can walk to downtown from my home, so we make trips there frequently (on foot) that we just wouldn’t make if we had to pile everyone into a car. I wish the US hadn’t designed its entire identity around the automobile.
numpad0 6y ago
What’s the take home message here? To me it’s clear: “Clickbaits are here to stay. Here’s how(hint: not why)”
robinduckett 6y ago
Correlation is not causation ️
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gampleman 6y ago
As someone who just had to purchase a 7 seater to fit our fourth child, I think there is a stronger effect there, except of course one wouldn't see a temporal change there as cars haven't routinely accommodated more than 5 passengers for a while.
lmilcin 6y ago
Funny but so true. I sometimes joke with my wife we can't have another child because we would need to buy a larger car. We have three kids, 18, 8 and 4 so it is already uncomfortable.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
There are several seats you can buy that will fit 3 across even in a very small car https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-fit/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...
jefftk 6y ago
> many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. We have this simple Walmart one [1] and it's 17" at the widest point. To fit three across, then, you need a car with 51" "shoulder room". Most small cars do have that much room: * Toyota Corolla: 52" [2] * Honda Civic: 55" [3] * Honda Fit: 53" [4] * Kia Forte: 55" [5] Yes, it's possible to get big bulky seats, but if you get relatively narrow ones they'll fit across the back of ~anything. [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cosco-Scenera-NEXT-Convertible-Car-Seat-Otto/41126739 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cosco-Scenera-NEXT-Convertible-Ca... [2] https://www.toyota.com/corolla/features/dimensions/1882/1856/1866 https://www.toyota.com/corolla/features/dimensions/1882/1856... [3] https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2020/Civic%20Sedan/specs https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2020/Civic%20S... [4] https://automobiles.honda.com/fit/specs-features-trim-comparison https://automobiles.honda.com/fit/specs-features-trim-compar... [5] https://www.kia.com/us/en/forte/specs https://www.kia.com/us/en/forte/specs
- mudetroit 6y ago
  Speaking as an owner of a small car (Honda Civic), and 3 children in need of car seats (a Slimfit Graco which is a bit wider then the one you listed, but 2 of them are now in boosters which are narrower to begin with.) The problem isn't always pure width. The rear seats in are contoured, for comfort reasons, in such a way that you need to put things under one side of the seat to level them out properly. And then the seats are so close together that leaving access to the seatbelt sockets for the children in boosters to access. So simplistic looks like this give you a really inaccurate picture of the problem. I will also go further and say that even in larger vehicles getting 3 seats across any single row is hard. Adding a 3rd row doesn't even necessarily solve all of the problems if there isn't an easy path out if you have two kids needing 5 point harnesses done by the parent. Those seats block the folding exit mechanism that a lot of 3rd row vehicles use to let passengers in the rear row exit. You would have to remove a seat entirely to let that action work.
- apta 6y ago
  The question is, do you really want to get the cheapest car set when safety is of utmost importance? There are car seats running into the $300+ range that seemingly offer much better protection.
aklemm 6y ago
That's a population control nudge I can get behind.
aklemm 6y ago
I would bet daycare rates as proportion of income have the same effect.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). Wait, is it usually legal to have a child seat in the front seat, except maybe in a two-seat car in any state with a child seat mandate? If not—and it isn't in the mandates I'm familiar with—the data does not seem consistent with the proposed causal channel. Or, a least, that last bit about occupied front seat is irrelevant and unrelated.
simonblack 6y ago
Having grown up in the 1960s, I took the title to mean that the change from those long, flat, comfortable bench-seats to individual bucket-seats meant that, while it was still possible, it was now much more difficult and uncomfortable to have sex in cars.
pyuser583 6y ago
I was raised in a very pro-natalism, Catholic commmunity. Large families were the norm. The car seat issue was very, very inflammatory. It was regarded as being anti-large family.
Bologo 6y ago
Also, there are many cars that can fit 3 baby-seats / car-seats in the back seat. Has that always been the case, or is that a new development?

377 points by longdefeat 6y ago

"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.

kazinator 6y ago
> 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.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  It’s extremely common for Americans to not wear bicycle helmets.
  - pletnes 6y ago
    Since they don’t bicycle, you mean?
    - kortilla 6y ago
      No, the ones that do bicycle frequently don’t wear helmets. The percentage varies widely based on city.
      - deathgrips 6y ago
        Yes, they just need to magically shrink the distances between cities
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - hobofan 6y ago
    I'm not sure if there is a big cultural divided regarding wearing helmets for safety reasons. 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
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      I think you have an inherent bias in your examples. There are bike riders outside of cities.
      - hobofan 6y ago
        If you mean rural travel between small cities/towns, that's what I head in mind too with the first example (as that's the setting I grew up in). If you mean sport biking (race, mountainbike, long distance), then you are right that I didn't consider those.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Oricle 6y ago
    So what! Fucking good goyhim you idiots are
- cs02rm0 6y ago
  No, I think just America. Europe isn't so safety crazed. For instance, it's common for Europeans not to wear bicycle helmets. That doesn't hold for the UK. Maybe it's spreading.
  - Thlom 6y ago
    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.
    - toyg 6y ago
      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...
      - pja 6y ago
        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.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  > > 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.
- PaulAJ 6y ago
  Actually we just focus our efforts on making sure everyone has potable water.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  >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. Italian, not too bad on Google translate: https://www.automobile.it/magazine/burocrazia/seggiolino-anti-abbandono-6905 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.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
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.
- soperj 6y ago
  No, you just need to drive less.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Drive less, train more, stop buying huge SUVs, improve traffic laws…there’s a lot we could be doing.
  - reallydontask 6y ago
    why not both?
  - Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
    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.
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      I wonder what would happen if you normalized by SAT/ACT score (or something that stands in for education level). 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.
smarnach 6y ago
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.
- freetime2 6y ago
  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.
  - lcrz 6y ago
    So a pretty minor inconvenience, got it.
  - drawfloat 6y ago
    That's clearly a minor inconvenience.
    - freetime2 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, have you had the experience?
  - el_benhameen 6y ago
    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?
    - himlion 6y ago
      When I don't plan to do more than 50 miles of driving on one side, I would definitely not bring them if there wasn't a legal requirement.
      - 6y ago
toyg 6y ago
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.
- Taek 6y ago
  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.
  - redisman 6y ago
    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.
    - Taek 6y ago
      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.
      - imtringued 6y ago
wastra 6y ago
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?
- michaelt 6y ago
  > As I won't pay Elsevier to read this article, I can't evaluate the (likely) methodolgical failings. 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.
  - wastra 6y ago
    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.
lcrz 6y ago
"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." https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/child_passenger_safety/cps-factsheet.html 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.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  > 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?
  - bbarn 6y ago
    Wouldn't a five point harness be safer for everyone, adults included?
    - curlypaul924 6y ago
      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.
redgc 6y ago
Presumably if ~57 would have been fatal then there's also a lot of serious non-fatal injuries too
- contravariant 6y ago
  Not necessarily, if the distribution has a sufficiently long tail then there might not be all that many cases between 'minor injuries' and 'fatal'.
Arnt 6y ago
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.
- himlion 6y ago
  I recently read that the number is €2.6 million euro for the Netherlands.
- dash2 6y ago
  You might be optimistic to think that car safety regulation is designed so as to maximise consumer welfare. See eg https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.3.233 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.3.233
- onemiketwelve 6y ago
  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-vs-the-economy 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.
mola 6y ago
"a problem" 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?
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  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.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  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.
  - yohannparis 6y ago
    Immigrations is a viable and already available response to this problem. Unfortunately most western countries are not willing to embrace it.
learnstats2 6y ago
That's... a lot of deaths, and a lot of grieving families. If the same number of deaths happened at an annual event, it would be major news headlines.
- donatj 6y ago
  At the same time, it leads you to wonder how many deaths were caused as as direct and indirect result of the seats and their associated costs. I would guess it’s non-zero when talking in the scale of hundreds of millions of children.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    If you guess it's non-zero, can you identify one such case?
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  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.
kkielhofner 6y ago
57 deaths isn't a lot (in statistical terms) but this figure reminds me of the missing bullet holes: https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d 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.
- jwalton 6y ago
  Freakonomics did a good Ted Talk about why we probably don't need car seats for kids who are 7: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_about_child_carseats https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo... 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-seats-vs-seat-belts/ https://freakonomics.com/2005/07/09/more-evidence-on-car-sea...
- davidsolomon 6y ago
  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.
k2enemy 6y ago
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.
tyxodiwktis 6y ago
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?
- lucasmullens 6y ago
  Are you really under the impression half of everyone is ugly because they slept on their backs?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 0.1% reduction in death rate 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.
- LasEspuelas 6y ago
  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.
- spenczar5 6y ago
  Do you have a cite for that 47% figure?

glouwbug 6y ago

I mean, it doesn't take a car seat to tell you kids are expensive. You're saving 50% on child care costs already by not having a third child

recursive 6y ago
50%? I can't come up with any remotely plausible formula that gives anything too far from ~33%.
- hervature 6y ago
  I think it's 2*1.5 = 3 (3rd kid is 50% more expensive)
  - recursive 6y ago
    Ok, I can imagine how "avoiding a 50% increase" could be construed as "saving 50%".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- glouwbug 6y ago
  If only the cost of having children were linear
  - recursive 6y ago
    In my experience, it seems to be sub-linear. Subsequent ones don't require all new everything.
    - imhoguy 6y ago
      That depends on gender and age difference with sibilings.

whoisninja 6y ago

ok by that logic you could also say cars were the original contraception because not more than 3 kids can fit even without car seats lol

willvarfar 6y ago
Seats used to be benches and those that didn't fit in a seat sat on knees or in the back.
- whoisninja 6y ago
  ok then the move from benches to seats become the real contraceptive, well played bro lol
whoisninja 6y ago
guess what my 1br apartment is also a contraceptive

gpapilion 6y ago

I think about the marginal safety improvement vs the economic costs of car seats a lot since having kids. The biggest improvement, the initial car seat laws probably made things better. At some point though it has direct costs with things like booster seats running until kids are big enough (probably 3rd or 4th grade), and indirect cost like you may have to miss work because you can’t have someone without a seat pick the kid up. All in all it’s different than it was 30 years ago, and more expensive to do relatively mundane tasks with your kids.

scrapcode 6y ago
Great point. With everything going on in the world and myself being a new father, I've recently reflected on the costs of these as well. We were gifted a "base" so that I can keep one in my vehicle and my wife can have one in hers, but it expires in a few months. These things are expensive and lower income people often have to make due. Expiration dates / enforcement (if such a thing) add one more thing lower income families are forced to break the rules on.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Get a 360 degree seat once you outgrow the capsule... IMHO seats are not expensive. We've got one of the best one and spread over 4.5 years it's half of what nappies cost.
jtsiskin 6y ago
What (dollars:life) value do you think is the cutoff point? I wonder what the dollars:life cutoff value is across various policies, using (marginal safety improvement:the economic costs) to calculate it.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Here’s the EPA’s take, that a life is worth $7.4M: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-valuation#whatvalue https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...

peterburkimsher 6y ago

This is a research paper proposing a causal link between child seat regulations and family size. It is not about procreation in cars, such as the song by Cake - Stick Shifts and Safety Belts. "I need you to be here with me, Not way over in a bucket seat. But when we're driving in my Malibu, It's easy to get right next to you."

hinkley 6y ago
Do you remember bench seats in cars? I think that song might be a little more literal than you’re assuming.
- anon73044 6y ago
  >Do you remember bench seats in cars? Still available in full size trucks, more likely to be found in fleet work trucks though. 5 minutes of googling tells me the 2013 Impala was the probably the last car sold with a front bench option. I would have guessed it would be that or a Crown Vic.

ponker 6y ago

I see that the effect is concentrated in households with a car, but I wonder how much of this is due to the car seats themselves, and how much is due to the vast array of things designed for a “family of 4.” Restaurants take twice as long to seat a table of 5 vs. 4, venues have policies like “one free child per adult,” etc.... when we became a family of 5 everything immediately got much higher-friction. And we knew it was going to happen, and strongly considered not having a third kid because of it. Interestingly we are now considering a fourth kid because we’ve already eaten the cost of going to this high-friction lifestyle like getting the minivan.

echelon 6y ago

Speaking of fertility, we need to provide stimulus and incentives to encourage more childbirth. We also need to become more pro-immigration. America won't be the top consumer economy for much longer, and we won't be producing the same volume of talent.

jariel 6y ago
"America won't be the top consumer economy" - this is not a race worth trying to win. It's better to figure out 'quality' over 'quantity' now, and get with the 21st century.
- echelon 6y ago
  > this is not a race worth trying to win Earnestly, why not? Edit with my concerns: America is still a bastion of personal liberty. I'd shudder to think of a world where something else throws around all the weight. We're already censoring American entertainment to appease the juggernauts in the search of profit. I don't think the coming world will be comfortable.
  - andykx 6y ago
    Other first world (mainly European) countries are, in general, far happier than we are, despite having significantly smaller consumer economies. Why is that? Edit: America is only a bastion of personal liberty if you look and act a certain way. Is personal liberty such an important thing anyway? It seems to be creating huge problems for us at the moment. I am not an advocate for an entirely collectivist society, but I think a small dose of collectivism would help us all. People refuse to acknowledge the benefits they get from our society without wanting to play their part by paying taxes.
    - klipt 6y ago
      Probably because they spend less on the military and more on their people. But would they be able to do that if they couldn't rely on US protection via NATO? If the US suddenly disappeared, would Europe be ripe for invasion by, say, Russia?

jacobn 6y ago

The increase in car seat requirements and sizes has probably also contributed to the shifting of consumer demand toward larger and larger vehicles. Which has a host of economic and environmental consequences beyond the number of children.

542354234235 6y ago
Larger vehicles also lead to deadlier collisions. Rarely is anything a pure universal good with no tradeoffs.

foreigner 6y ago

LOL they forgot to factor in how many kids are conceived in the back seat of a car!

sudhirj 6y ago
Yeah, I came in here thinking this was about seat law changes leading to less conception in cars.
jabl 6y ago
Awkward to do if the back seat row is filled with child seats.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I’d say it’s more awkward when the row is filled with children…
zwayhowder 6y ago
I had assumed that it was an article about bucket seats precipitating a drop in in-car conception. (Ala Cake's song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zip4QyJyD5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zip4QyJyD5g )

scotty79 6y ago

I can't imagine how could you filter out all other things that correlate with number and age of children, presence of a male and likelyhood of having a third child and reproductive preferences evolution in time and car safety rules evolution in time.

bartkappenburg 6y ago

Here’s an interesting twelve year old TED talk on car seat economics from Steven Levitt (freakonomics): https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0 https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0

pkage 6y ago

I read through the underlying paper, and I don't quite understand their methodology. It seems like they're taking a bucketload of demographic information and then trying to control for every other possible factor that could affect fertility rates to isolate the effect of car seat laws. I'm skeptical that it's even possible to control for all of those variables. Even assuming that they perfectly model the factors they do account for, it's perfectly possible that there are more underlying factors. Additionally, interpreting the results as t-statistics doesn't really tell us very much, as the variation between model and reality could easily be noise from the control variables rather than from a relationship between car seat laws and fertility. I'm not saying the paper doesn't have any merit at all--I think the idea is quite interesting. I am just skeptical of inferring anything from the results, given that the methodology is very poorly described (and is so error-prone).

7MinOfTerror 6y ago
If you don't understand their methodology, you probably shouldn't be attempting to critique it. Why is it that internet forum commenters think they're qualified to examine the work of professional researchers who have spent years if not decades studying in their field? Edit: y'all are totally right, apparently a teenager who hasn't even completed their bachelors (in AI/CompSci) is qualified to read a public health research paper because they "demonstrate an understanding of statistics." This is functionally indistinguishable from mothers who jump on the internet and think they can read, interpret, and critique research papers on vaccines. "THIS PAPER DOESN'T CONSIDER THAT MERCURY IS TOXIC!!!"
- sideshowb 6y ago
  The rest of gp's post exhibits good understanding of statistics. I suspect they're actually more qualified than "internet forum commentator". And it's good to be honest about what you do/don't understand, the fault could be in the explanation...
  - 7MinOfTerror 6y ago
    Understanding statistics does not mean you understand science or public health or research. "It wasn't explained to me, therefore it is invalid" is not valid.

dwg 6y ago

> We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000 Ironic... but a would-be birth vs. loss of life in an accident are immeasurably different things; incomparable. As an slightly off-topic aside, I live in a rural area of Japan where, in my experience, most kids ride without car seats. In fact, small children around 3 to 6 often don't use seatbelts, instead standing between the seats or sit on an adults lap. There is a apparently a child seat law, but it seems a large number of people ignore it. I think the big reason is a lower accident rate, due to more careful driving.

jtsiskin 6y ago
Yes the authors here really sound like this is an argument to relax the car seat age, but that sounds like a ridiculous argument to me. Do you think we should kill this random child if it would lead to (8000/57) = 104 families who can't afford a minivan to decide to have a third kid?
- samcheng 6y ago
  It's just an insightful paper of an effect, well-proven and thought provoking. I don't think they are advocating for fewer car seats.
- Thlom 6y ago
  On the other hand, how many kids are killed by huge SUV's bought to fit the third child seat where the driver can't see a children in front of their car?
- lrem 6y ago
  "Kill" is a very strong exaggeration though. Pretty much all the proper research I've ever stumbled upon claimed no measurable effect of child car seats or booster seats over the age of 8. First hit from Google today: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180105124030.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180105124030.h...

alexchamberlain 6y ago

My first child is 5 and a half months old. Our limiting factors are required sleep and lack of boot (trunk?) space...

cs02rm0 6y ago

I had one child and then twins, so I felt like I was just dropped into this. I was pretty shocked turning up with car seats at a Mercedes dealership to find we couldn't get three of them across an E class even without using ISOFIX. IIRC it was slightly exacerbated by two of them being seats for babies. FWIW we went with a Volvo V70. We didn't want an MPV or SUV.

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
I also thought I didn’t want an MPV. Then I bought one and have never been so happy about a car. They have such a terrible reputation but they are so practical with kids.
jabl 6y ago
> I had one child and then twins, so I felt like I was just dropped into this. Same. > FWIW we went with a Volvo V70. We didn't want an MPV or SUV. I've been happy with a "Compact MPV" (which I think is what the class is called). Currently Toyota Verso, previously VW Touran. Both fit 3 child seats in the rear. But it seems the compact MPV class is on its way out (e.g. Toyota doesn't produce the Verso anymore), everybody for some unexplainable reason wants a SUV nowadays.
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  The SUV trend for families is a weird one. I tried so many and they are mostly just large on the outside. And they don’t drive much fun either.
  - raegis 6y ago
    I have three children, and our solution was the Honda Odyssey. It has a separate back middle seat with its own pair of car seat anchors. Yes, it's big on the inside. None of the other SUVs I saw had the middle seat anchors.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    > The SUV trend for families is a weird one. I once heard SUVs described as station wagons for people who didn't want to admit they'd turned into their parents.

madmax108 6y ago

I genuinely thought the article would be a study that concluded "You are less likely to get pregnant copulating in the backseat of your car as opposed to your bed" or something similar, and if it were, it would be a great nominee for an ignobel [1] But damn, this paper was not about that but about car economics implications that follow having a third child :P [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

dnhz 6y ago

What about paying to send three kids to college at about the same time versus two? Couldn't that be as big a consideration as the physical limits for fitting car seats into a car?

subroutine 6y ago
You are basically saying that having 3 kids is more expensive than having 2 kids, which is more expensive than having 1 kid... and that people take the extra cost into consideration before having a kid. Indeed, they do, obviously. In many ways having a kid is quite a potent contraceptive (for having another kid). https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-families-in-the-us-by-number-of-children/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-familie...
- cjg 6y ago
  That chart is highly confusing. For example, if a family has three children spaced 2 years apart, they would only contribute to the three children part of the plot for just over half the time that they contribute to something other than no children part of the plot.
  - subroutine 6y ago
    You are right. Good catch.
nostrademons 6y ago
If you're under financial aid thresholds that often doesn't matter. The financial aid formulas (at least when I went to college, overlapping with my sister for 3 out of the 4 years) were that the college figured out an expected family contribution, it was split between the number of kids enrolled that year, and then the college makes up the difference with financial aid. My sister's tuition dropped by half when I entered college.

andi999 6y ago

I thought before reading it it is about male infertility because of seat heating... But pray tell me, is it true that three child seat do not fit on the back bench of a typical US car? I find this hard to believe. Btw are kids allowed to sit on the shotgun seat in front?

frosted-flakes 6y ago
Kids are not supposed to sit in the front seat. Every vehicle I've been in has a large warning label on the sun visor that states that children under 13 (I think) shouldn't sit in the front seat due to the danger caused by the airbag. I have also seen some vans that allow you to disable the passenger airbag with the ignition key in a keyhole in the dashboard. I don't know if it's safe for kids in that case though.
- andi999 6y ago
  Here basically all cars can switch off the airbag. So how do you do it if you drive with your 6 month old? Crying alone in the back? (Of course with two parents one is probably sitting in the back)
  - rimliu 6y ago
    If you cannot drive with a kid in the back, you cannot drive at all, because it means your attention is on the kid, not the driving. We had no problem driving with the kid in the back, no matter the age.
    - andi999 6y ago
      In the US you mean? Kid is probably quieter if can see the parent closer.
      - frosted-flakes 6y ago
        Some parents might let their ten year old sit in the front, but I have never seen a car seat there, and it's made pretty clear that car seats always go in the back. In most cars you can reach back and comfort them with one hand, while still keeping your eyes on the road. Otherwise you stop, or let them cry.

sayrer 6y ago

A Hacker News account might be a more effective method.

saagarjha 6y ago
I doubt it. If I had to guess, the majority of people on Hacker News probably have at least one child.
- sayrer 6y ago
  Hmm, I haven't seen any data on that. But your comment does seem to be representative of HN, so you could be right.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I think in general most people just have children. Hacker News may skew mildly away from this but even at say a typical software company I suspect most employees are parents.

burlesona 6y ago

Anecdotally this rings very true for me. Dealing with car seats is one of the most annoying and cumbersome issues of being a parent in the US. However I will also say, for the sake of other parents who may be in a similar boat: Diono Radian carseats fit 3 across in our Mazda 3, which isn't exactly a big car. So if you find the right seat, you can make it work. The biggest problem is the infant period where they have to face backwards. For that we went with a Cybex Aton 2, which was sufficiently "vertical" that the front seat passenger could sit comfortably. Everything else we tried required the front seat to be shoved way too far forward.

MandieD 6y ago
The Joie i-Snug 2 is the one infant seat with a snap-in base we found that would fit in our 2008 Ford Fiesta and allow me (1.65m) to sit comfortably in the front passenger seat. My husband (1.85m) can fit in that seat, but we’re not sure how great that’s going to be for long drives where we need to switch drivers. We’re in Germany, which appears to have similar car seat rules to the US, along with increasingly large cars, but without home or public garages that are growing at the same rate. I’d like to replace the Fiesta with a hybrid Corolla wagon, but the current model is 5cm too long for our garage from the 80s.

phreeza 6y ago

Reminds me of the birth interval in hunter-gatherers vs. farming people in prehistory. Hunter-gatherers were supposedly constrained in their birth spacing by the need to carry their infants when roaming around, while farmers had no such constraint and were thus able to out-reproduce hunter-gatherers.

igor47 6y ago
oh, interesting. do you have a source?
- phreeza 6y ago
  I think I read it in a Jared Diamond book, but here it is in an interview with him: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P8054.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P8054... (page 5)
oceanofsolaris 6y ago
I would imagine that the amount of available calories is overall the larger influence on which society grows and which doesn't. Remember that in most hunter-gatherer and farming societies, population stayed constant despite high birth numbers.
- phreeza 6y ago
  This is kind of mentioned in the interview I posted in the sibling reply, but I could imagine that this mainly drives down the density, but not so much the rate of growth. The reason is that grown individuals can actually usually feed themselves by roaming. What is hard is achieving a caloric surplus, which is why there is little specialisation and social stratification.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Also, hunter-gatherers supposedly breast fed for up to 4 years, which also tends to space children. The invention and marketing of ‘formula being better than breastmilk’ is what truly shot up the number of children per family 100 years ago.

irrational 6y ago

Huh. We have seven kids. This didn't play at all into our decision on how many kids to have. Though, they were spaced out far enough that the older ones were aging out of car seats before the younger ones needed them. I don't think we ever had more than 2 kids in a carseat and 1 kid in a booster seat. We are down to 1 kid in a booster seat and the three oldest driving cars on their own now.

subroutine 6y ago
Your personal anecdote would be, more or less, consistent with their findings... "there are no significant differences in birth rates when a woman has two children where just one requires a carseat." That said, I don't think this is anything more than a correlation; not even a strong correlation (requiring many caveats, controls, and cofactors), and to me that effect size seems nominal.

kleiba 6y ago

We looked around for quite some time before we found a car that fits three car seats in the back. (Mind you, we're talking European cars here, there's a chance our options would have been greater in North America.) However, it only took us a little longer because we weren't keen on a (mini) van -- had we considered vans too, there would have been a lot more options, and they're often even more affordable than other types of (spacious) cars. I understand that not everyone can afford to go out and buy a new car -- but if that is in your way of having more children, I'd say the reason was not the car seat requirement but cost considerations. And I think that's very much a reasonable consideration. I don't buy the "only 57 child deaths" argument - besides obviously being ethically questionable, deaths is not the only thing you want to prevent: how about (severe) non-lethal injuries? The reason car seats are mandatory (and regulated, too) is not because there is a strong car seat lobby but because of the merits they provide. For instance, buckling up a child that isn't tall enough yet bears the risk of getting the belt wrapped around their neck instead of across their chest which in case of an impact is certainly not what you want. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to find the narrative of this paper questionable. Being a parent myself, I find it very hard to imagine a couple going: "Oh, we would so love to have a third child if it wasn't for that dang car seat problem..." Not that it's completely inconceivable but, I mean, come on...

saagarjha 6y ago
Excellent word choice on that last sentence ;)
bbarn 6y ago
I think your point of "cost considerations" is at the heart of what bothers me about this paper. The laws about seatbelts, car seats, etc. came at the same time as a general sense of more parental responsibility as a whole. A few decades earlier the cost of additional children was much lower in every way.
ziotom78 6y ago
> Being a parent myself, I find it very hard to imagine a couple going: "Oh, we would so love to have a third child if it wasn't for that dang car seat problem..." Not that it's completely inconceivable but, I mean, come on... I and my wife have three children, and a few years ago we seriously considered having another one. There were several factors that led us to give up with this idea (moving to a larger house, increased tuition costs, etc.), but surely the act of buying a larger car was something we listed among the cons, and it played a non-negligible role in our final decision.

globular-toast 6y ago

What is the age that children are required to be in a car seat? My parents had five children and I don't think they ever even owned two car seats at one time, but they did have a booster seat.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Weirdly have they controlled for a 3rd child as opposed to +1 child? The world (in the West, UK, ok ok not world but you know what i mean), is arrayed against a third child - to get three car seats in the back seat of a car (with ISO fix) you jump up to a new more expensive range of cars. Hotel rooms - book a double room with 2 adults and 2 kids is fine, with a third (non baby) and you have to (fire regulations) book 2 rooms, and have an adult in each room. All sorts of weird things pop up. None of which are conducive to the production of another child ...

_-___________-_ 6y ago
"Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, ..." Right there in the abstract.
jleahy 6y ago
The UK is pragmatic, if you have more than two children (and all except the youngest two are over 3) then you only need to put the youngest two in car seats. They know you can’t easily fit a third one. Seems very reasonable.

lkramer 6y ago

Just to be clear, this is a positive, right? Smaller cars = less environmental impact, less children = less environmental impact. Win/win...

christophilus 6y ago

I’d take it a step further and say that the car is contraceptive. Kids are much less stressful in a pedestrian-friendly setting. I can walk to downtown from my home, so we make trips there frequently (on foot) that we just wouldn’t make if we had to pile everyone into a car. I wish the US hadn’t designed its entire identity around the automobile.

numpad0 6y ago

What’s the take home message here? To me it’s clear: “Clickbaits are here to stay. Here’s how(hint: not why)”

robinduckett 6y ago

Correlation is not causation ️

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gampleman 6y ago

As someone who just had to purchase a 7 seater to fit our fourth child, I think there is a stronger effect there, except of course one wouldn't see a temporal change there as cars haven't routinely accommodated more than 5 passengers for a while.

lmilcin 6y ago

Funny but so true. I sometimes joke with my wife we can't have another child because we would need to buy a larger car. We have three kids, 18, 8 and 4 so it is already uncomfortable.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

There are several seats you can buy that will fit 3 across even in a very small car https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-fit/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

jefftk 6y ago

> many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. We have this simple Walmart one [1] and it's 17" at the widest point. To fit three across, then, you need a car with 51" "shoulder room". Most small cars do have that much room: * Toyota Corolla: 52" [2] * Honda Civic: 55" [3] * Honda Fit: 53" [4] * Kia Forte: 55" [5] Yes, it's possible to get big bulky seats, but if you get relatively narrow ones they'll fit across the back of ~anything. [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cosco-Scenera-NEXT-Convertible-Car-Seat-Otto/41126739 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cosco-Scenera-NEXT-Convertible-Ca... [2] https://www.toyota.com/corolla/features/dimensions/1882/1856/1866 https://www.toyota.com/corolla/features/dimensions/1882/1856... [3] https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2020/Civic%20Sedan/specs https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2020/Civic%20S... [4] https://automobiles.honda.com/fit/specs-features-trim-comparison https://automobiles.honda.com/fit/specs-features-trim-compar... [5] https://www.kia.com/us/en/forte/specs https://www.kia.com/us/en/forte/specs

mudetroit 6y ago
Speaking as an owner of a small car (Honda Civic), and 3 children in need of car seats (a Slimfit Graco which is a bit wider then the one you listed, but 2 of them are now in boosters which are narrower to begin with.) The problem isn't always pure width. The rear seats in are contoured, for comfort reasons, in such a way that you need to put things under one side of the seat to level them out properly. And then the seats are so close together that leaving access to the seatbelt sockets for the children in boosters to access. So simplistic looks like this give you a really inaccurate picture of the problem. I will also go further and say that even in larger vehicles getting 3 seats across any single row is hard. Adding a 3rd row doesn't even necessarily solve all of the problems if there isn't an easy path out if you have two kids needing 5 point harnesses done by the parent. Those seats block the folding exit mechanism that a lot of 3rd row vehicles use to let passengers in the rear row exit. You would have to remove a seat entirely to let that action work.
apta 6y ago
The question is, do you really want to get the cheapest car set when safety is of utmost importance? There are car seats running into the $300+ range that seemingly offer much better protection.

aklemm 6y ago

That's a population control nudge I can get behind.

aklemm 6y ago

I would bet daycare rates as proportion of income have the same effect.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). Wait, is it usually legal to have a child seat in the front seat, except maybe in a two-seat car in any state with a child seat mandate? If not—and it isn't in the mandates I'm familiar with—the data does not seem consistent with the proposed causal channel. Or, a least, that last bit about occupied front seat is irrelevant and unrelated.

simonblack 6y ago

Having grown up in the 1960s, I took the title to mean that the change from those long, flat, comfortable bench-seats to individual bucket-seats meant that, while it was still possible, it was now much more difficult and uncomfortable to have sex in cars.

pyuser583 6y ago

I was raised in a very pro-natalism, Catholic commmunity. Large families were the norm. The car seat issue was very, very inflammatory. It was regarded as being anti-large family.

Bologo 6y ago

Also, there are many cars that can fit 3 baby-seats / car-seats in the back seat. Has that always been the case, or is that a new development?