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Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
- tsjq 6y agohttps://archive.is/12q3d https://archive.is/12q3d
- IBCNU 6y ago"number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with films nocolas cage appeard in"
- handmodel 6y agoWhile I don't quite see how the safety seat alone could cause that much of a difference, I don't think it is unreasonable to see a causal relationship here. Raising a child has gotten more expensive in the US for many reasons (laws about child seats, more money needed for education, no longer socially acceptable to leave kids alone for awhile) and that certainly has an impact.
- chrisco255 6y agoI'll throw one out there: the birth rate has been falling everywhere across the globe at the same time, even in countries that don't have the same laws about child safety restraints. So the hypothesis is bogus, or it's a tiny fraction of what holistic analysis would suggest are the causes.
- IBCNU 6y agoIt's unreasonable to see causal relationships without rigor, always.
- pingpongchef 6y agoSkepticism is good, but not outright dismissal
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- el_nahual 6y agoThe conclusions here are fairly robust because there's a few natural experiments due to different states enacting stricter child safety laws at different times.
- ortusdux 6y agoI once read a convincing argument that, in some cases, American's resistance to helmets caused helmet laws to have a net negative effect on health. The author claimed that the laws caused enough of a reduction in ridership that the lost exercise outweighed the reduction in injury. I've attempted to find the paper again, but I can't seem to track it down.
- mb7733 6y agoI believe you're thinking of Australia. There are very few (if any?) places in the US with helmet laws for adults.
- blang 6y agoKing county Washington[1]. [1] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/violence-injury-prevention/traffic-safety/bicycle-safety.aspx#:~:text=It's%20the%20law!,age)%20must%20wear%20a%20helmet.&text=Avoid%20fines%2C%20fees%2C%20and%20injuries%20by%20wearing%20a%20bike%20helmet https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/violence-injury-prev...!
- Analemma_ 6y agoIt seems to be very rarely enforced. I ride in Seattle without a helmet all the time and have never had a problem.
- svachalek 6y agoThis reads like a textbook example of "correlation is not causation". You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one.
- fosap 6y agoPlease RFA. "The reduction they saw was confined to households that did actually have access to a car" "They discovered that tightening these laws had no detectable effects on the rate of first and second children". Also, if i understand it correctly, you have about 50 quasi experiments, one for each state.
- Nacraile 6y agoPlease RFA more ;) "the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families" So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
- souprock 6y agoWith increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course. Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.
- ashtonkem 6y agoMost well-to-do families that I know drive a very large SUV as their secondary car, often a Q7 or a Land Rover.
- minikites 6y agoThe unspoken assertion is that we want a high birth rate. Why do we want a high birth rate?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago> Why do we want a high birth rate? Economic pyramid scheme, such as entitlements and economic growth mandates that rely on it. A lower birth rate is preferred (less resource contention and impact on the ecosystems we rely on for survival), we should be driving it down with economic incentives (faster than it’s falling naturally). It happens naturally as women are empowered and educated (per Our World In Data [1]). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...
- giantg2 6y agoI pretty much agree. What would be an example be of an economic policy that would maintain stability while bringing the birth rate down below the replacement rate?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoDirect cash transfers to those who opt out of having children voluntarily (as their opt out has value they should be compensated for), while accepting that more tax revenue will be needed to support entitlements during the population decline curve. We’re in a sort of resource debt and will end up having to pay it back, balancing gdp cost with quality of life of those here now who will eventually age out. Can’t grow forever in a physical system with constraints.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoYou obviously don't need to pay people to not have kids because the fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate. The hard question would be how to maintain the existing programs that provide social assistance to the elderly without a larger population of working people to pay the taxes to fund them. The existing solution is to run preposterously large deficits every year, which seems problematic/unsustainable.
- giantg2 6y agoI can see this as being correlated, but I don't see this as being causative. And that's from someone who thinks some of the child/society safety laws are a bit absurd. I think maybe it could go something like this: child safety laws are more prevalent/stringent in advanced society, living in an advanced society carries a higher cost of living, as the cost of living goes up (without matching income raises, like the US for the past 30+yrs) the people who feel they can't afford children rises. I think there are other underlying causes and the overall effect is a combination.
- gowld 6y agoThis article teases apart factors: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/28/child-safety-laws-may-reduce-the-birth-rate https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/28/...
- Pet_Ant 6y agoSee this comment from this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25446153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25446153
- brighton36 6y agoWe are Marcuse's one dimensional man.
- kube-system 6y ago> They discovered that tightening those laws had no detectable effects on the rates of births of first and second children, but was accompanied by a drop, on average, of 0.73 percentage points in the number of women giving birth to a third while the first two were young enough to need safety seats. That may not sound much, but it is a significant fraction of the 9.36% of women in the sample who did become third-time mothers. > The authors also made two other pertinent observations. The reduction they saw was confined to households that did actually have access to a car. And it was larger in households where a man was living with the mother. The latter point is relevant, they think, because this man would take up space in a vehicle that could otherwise be occupied by a child. Yikes. The front passenger seat is not an acceptable place to put a car seat anyway.
- 0942v8653 6y agoNewer cars disable the passenger airbag if the weight of the occupant is less than a certain threshold (65 lbs according to https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2018/Civic%20Sedan/features/Driver-Airbag-Seat-Position/1/driver-airbag-seat-position-passenger-airbag-weight-sensors-pdf https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2018/Civic%20S...).
- kube-system 6y agoThe idea is to protect lighter weight occupants who are wearing seatbelts; they're not particularly reliable in the case that someone has yanked the seat belts tight on a car seat that is sitting on the seat bottom. Some quotes from your source: > Placing a forward-facing child seat in the front seat can be hazardous, even with advanced front airbags that automatically turn the passenger’s front airbag off. > WARNING Placing a forward-facing child seat in the front seat can result in serious injury or death if the front airbag inflates. > WARNING Placing a rear-facing child seat in the front seat can result in serious injury or death during a crash.
- giantg2 6y ago"The idea is to protect lighter weight occupants who are wearing seatbelts;" Not exactly. Lighter weight occupants are not supposed to be in the front seat wearing a seatbelt. The same places you're getting the warnings for not placing child seats in the front seat will also tell you not to put children in the front seat. They try to plug it as a safety thing as a way to protect ignorant consumers from themselves.
- irateswami 6y agoThis is an actual conversation I had to have with my wife, having a third kid definitely requires a larger vehicle as the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five. Child car seats are too wide and the backseats of most cars are too narrow, and the price jump to a vehicle that would be able to handle three child car seats at once is enormous. Throw in some dogs, a couple pieces of luggage that any nuclear family would have to tote around, plus a stroller and it becomes prohibitively tight. It took me MONTHS of shopping and playing child-seat-jenga in various car dealership lots before I finally found a sedan that was actually able to hold everything (thank you, Volkswagen, for making an actual family sedan that could fit a family!).
- kube-system 6y agoWhen I was young, this was what minivans were for: families with three kids.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThrow in one kids best friend who is always around and maybe a grandparent who lives alone, going up to a 7 seater starts to get appealing pretty quickly.
- gowld 6y agoMinivans seat 7-8, which is 6 kids.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoWith today's car seats, it can be made to work but it's a challenge. Realistically 2 kids in car seats makes the middle seat of anything but the largest cars impractical. At which point you are going up an extra row of seats, 6 seat layouts are uncommon.
- kube-system 6y agoYou can't fill every back seat with a car seat. You will have issues accessing the rear if you put 3 in the middle row, the rear seat often isn't wide enough to accommodate three seats
- dzdt 6y agoI think there is a plausible mechanism for causation here. It adds to the expensiveness of children -- many smaller vehicles are not even compatible with the big car seats required, or with having more than two car seats in use. There is kind of a calculation: if we would have even one kid we need a "family" car; getting to 3 or more kids basically requires a minivan.
- gowld 6y agoA Full-size sedan fits 3 child-seats, if you choose an appropriate thin design of seat.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> A Full-size sedan fits 3 child-seats, if you choose an appropriate thin design of seat. If all three are of such a design, which only exist meeting the requirements for child safety seats for older children. If any one is an infant seat, that doesn't work. If you have N children of ages requiring safety seats, you will for some period of that require at least 1 infant seat and N-1 other seats to transport them all legally.
- christinamltn 6y agoThere are common convertible seats which are legal for infants (e.g., Chicco NextFit & Britax Clicktight have a 5lb min weight, Graco 4ever goes down to 4lbs, the Clek seats have an add-on to go down to 5lbs). An infant-specific seat is convenient but not strictly required to be legal.
- arcticbull 6y agoIn general there's a strong negative correlation between development of a society and birth rate. Also income. It's extremely powerful, and applies literally all over the world. I suspect that in America over the last few decades, development continued. Child-safety laws came along for the ride. [1, 2] Income is a less compelling argument in America as wages have remained totally constant on an inflation adjusted basis for ages. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-TFR-and-human-development-index-HDI_fig1_46547111 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-TFR... [2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
- gowld 6y agoThere's a great article that investigates this and presents a more refined analysis so separate out factors like child-safety laws: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/28/child-safety-laws-may-reduce-the-birth-rate https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/28/... It was recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445643
- arcticbull 6y agoFunny :)
- sudo_bang_bang 6y agoImportant to note that real income per capita isn’t actually flat, only household income but that’s likely because of household size changes. See here for disposable real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
- arcticbull 6y agoGreat call-out thank you!
- loughnane 6y agoMakes me wonder about the effect of car reliance in general
- testfoobar 6y agoThe reality for a lot of families is that having children is frighteningly expensive. The twin costs of childcare and a reduction in parental work hours (often mom's) and as a result future career and income advancement potential can be substantial drag on a family's income. Each additional child just prolongs this drag. Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen.
- oramit 6y agoA coworker and his wife just had a child. They got on wait-lists before the child was even born because of the huge demand. They also told me that they were lucky to find a place (work subsidized) that was less than $1k.
- giantg2 6y ago"Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen." Except many grandparents are still working, especially to cover healthcare costs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoIn the US, elderly people have Medicare, so why is this happening?
- Forbo 6y agoI vouched for your comment, because I'm also curious. What healthcare costs is Medicare not covering?
- giantg2 6y agoThere are parts A-D. They can vary by part and by state, other factors too. I think you generally pay about $1k-$2k per year in premiums in total for all parts. There are also deductibles and copays. For example, the deductible is about $1500 for hospital stays and copays for doctors visits is 20% of the medicare approved costs. So it's lower than private insurance, but not negligible. It can get pretty expensive if you require lots of procedures or medications, as many people do at that age. Here is an article claiming the average cost for A and B parts is almost $8k per year. https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/02/05/heres-the-average-americans-annual-medicare-bill.aspx https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/02/05/heres-the-average...
- jefftk 6y agoUnderlying paper: https://privpapers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://privpapers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665... In the comments on my post about the paper when it originally came out (https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats) people pointed out that the methodology cannot determine whether there is a common cause, and a common cause is actually quite plausible. Posit that over time people are becoming more protective of children, for whatever reason. This (a) makes parenting substantially more work/money (closer supervision, more childcare hours), leading to people having fewer kids on the margin, and (b) makes people supportive of legislation to protect children (car seat laws). So while it looks that car seat laws are causing fewer children, they could actually both be caused by changing societal attitudes toward child protection.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoNone remembers the Superfreakonomics piece of child seats anymore. What a pity! See e.g. here https://freakonomics.com/2009/10/27/what-the-secretary-of-transportation-has-to-say-about-my-car-seat-research/ https://freakonomics.com/2009/10/27/what-the-secretary-of-tr...
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoMarriage rates are historic lows. Birth rates are historic lows. Women having careers is certainly the current belief why these are so low. Though as the article says they dont quite explain the situation. Car seats are ridiculous. Not a thing I considered before having a kid. It kind of makes sense, now that more kids could happen, the probability of filling the back seats with car seats is certainly expensive and annoying. Thus when that third kid comes along, the minivan must happen. A convincing argument being made by the article but I feel it's similar in that it's just 1 piece of the puzzle. The other factor no doubt occurring is how imbalanced the system has become. It has become increasingly risky to even have a relationship with a woman let alone going to the extent of having a kid. The nanny government has come in to 'help' in many ways far beyond just car seats.
- frongpik 6y agoWell educated kids is obviously an asset to our society, but it puzzles me how the same society not only doesn't reward men for raising kids, it makes kids their biggest liability. It's like planting a tree because our society cries wolf about deforestation, and then years later getting a 500k bill from USFS because they had to do some works related to that tree. Men really need a lot of altruism to start a family these days.
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoAs a father there are certainly upsides. The problem is the nanny government is all cases. There is a good intention but in turn adjust a social balance that is in place. Even something like alimony is a liability. So men simply don't get married anymore. The government seeing the failure of the system then that having a woman as your roommate is 'common law' and still counts. So you literally just cant have a woman roommate. Yes the original reasoning was that the woman might hinder her career by tending kids and shouldn't be punished. However it has evolved well past those goals. The government is practically incentivizing divorce or never having a relationship with women to beginwith.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago>Marriage rates are historic lows. Birth rates are historic lows. Women having careers is certainly the current belief why these are so low. In the olden days women had careers also, just only those ones in the upper-class. While women may not have had jobs like we think of them today, they also weren't at home taking care of households and chores and caring for children (they had an army of servants to do that for them) and so they pursued many of the same things upper-class men did. Birth rates and marriage rates are low now because our society doesn't value marriage and birth as much as previous ones. We no longer attach a person's worth to their marital status (and that has had many benefits, don't get me wrong). There are ongoing efforts to not see the point of marriage or a family as having and raising children (for now, it's still the first thing that comes to people's minds though). When that value isn't there socially, people won't struggle to attain that value. Instead we value material things a lot more (no way for me to prove that but it feels so clear when you read a bit of history or books from back then vs. now), and the best way to attain material things quickly is to not pursue things of declining social value (like babies and marriage).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- motohagiography 6y agoLacking an Economist subscription, is it due to a game theory explanation for how above a certain survival or wealth probability threshold, human societies switch from r-selection to K-selection, or is it just that the overprotected ones genetically select out because they grow up to be unattractive?
- defen 6y agoThe articles describes a study which purports to show that stricter child safety requirements for cars inhibits families from going from 2 -> 3 children, since it essentially forces them to buy a minivan, which is either too expensive or makes you look like the kind of family that drives a minivan.
- satellite2 6y ago> published in SSRN, a repository for so-called preprint papers that have yet to undergo formal peer review https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations Thanks to the Economist for our daily dose of sketchy papers
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoNot a surprise at all. When you start adding all sorts of "cost of compliance" stuff to having kids the people who can usually afford to comply (upper middle class, so most people here) start taking that into account. Meanwhile the rich and the poor just keep doing what they've been doing.
- lazyjones 6y agoI joked a few times about families in the 70s and early 80s often having a 3rd child as a reserve here in Europe, since we grew up without child seats, airbags and such things and the birth rate dropped by approximately 1 child per mother since these safety measures were introduced. Seems like there was some truth in that...
- vippy 6y agoA clear case of "correlation does not imply causation": the problem for Millennials is not child-safety laws, but student debt and asset prices.
- fallingfrog 6y agoI think this is sort of burying the lede though that if the cost of a bigger car is keeping people from having kids, that implies that the real reasons for the declining birth rate are economic.
- Spooky23 6y agoThis stuff is overplayed. My sister is super nutty about following every piece of guidance. It takes her 30 minutes to get out of the driveway.
- throwaway2245 6y agoThis claim is a little sus. Cars themselves have only been popular for 100 years or so. A 0.73% drop in third child births is really nothing compared to what else has happened to the birth rate over that time period - the effect size is very small.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bpodgursky 6y agoThis is all rings very true, but there's a lemma which might not play well on HN: how much does requiring people to use public transit reduce the birth rate? Getting 3+ children around town to school, errands, etc in a minivan isn't a trivial job. Dragging around 3 under-six children by bus, or train? That's nearly Herculean. I would expect the fertility hit to large families from the _lack_ of cars to be far, far greater than the hit from requiring larger cars. This also aligns with the (traditional) higher US fertility rate, where the US has been traditionally (large) car focused, whereas small cars and mass transit dominated in Europe.
- sitkack 6y agoGood!
- gwbas1c 6y agoChild #3 is about to be born any day now. I was shocked to learn that we just can't get three car seats into the back of our Model 3. Fortunately the other vehicle is a minivan, but the rear row can seat 3 without car seats, or two with car seats. This means we can no longer fit grandparents with all kids.
- in_cahoots 6y agoLook into the Radian and the Clek. I’d be surprised if they don’t work.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYou might want to double-check that. I was looking at a thread specifically about 3 carseats in the back of a Model 3. There are several options. You might need new carseats. But I managed to get our 3 kids in the back of my first generation Nissan Leaf, which I think is slightly smaller.
- gwbas1c 6y agoThe 1st generation Leaf was larger inside. I like the Leaf's interior much more than the Model 3. (But, overall the Model 3 is a much, much better car.)
- Robotbeat 6y agoThe first gen leaf is higher, for sure, because it's almost a crossover like the Model Y (and this is nice for loading and unloading the kids, altho it hits the efficiency slightly), but I'm really not sure it's any wider. You really can fit 3 kids abreast in a Model 3.
- gok 6y ago(Exciting!) I do wonder how many techie parents are waiting for the 7 seat Tesla before getting their third or fourth kid.
- jeofken 6y agoCongratulations! Driving a van sounds like a good choice when everyone has to go.
- conanbatt 6y agoI found out about this from a hacker news comments not long ago. I have a hard time believing the causality of it, but if its true, it would be quite an incredible indictment against child-safety laws.
- hyko 6y agoTwo blokes wonder why the same highly educated women who want a safer world for their children don’t want to push four babies out of their vagina. Edited to add: “Dr Nickerson and Dr Solomon found, in fact, that the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families” - they put this down to them not wanting to buy a larger vehicle to accommodate 3+ kids because it’s too gauche! I think we’re supposed to conclude that car seats are actually costing lives, which is the wrong conclusion to draw because it ignores all the injury and disability caused by car accidents.
- chunsj 6y agoVery economist argument. Removing Child-safety law may increase child mortality.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoThese are the kind of harmful effects that prohibiting market options, that fall below some arbitrary quality/safety standard, have.
- jtbayly 6y agoThis paper is fascinating and probably the basis of the article (I can’t tell since it’s paywalled): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 I think the really sad part is the increased burden of rules supposedly to protect kids that are useless, such as booster seat laws.