Stop making something as wonderful as children into an -ist. While you may be correct that we have too many people, calling humans who want to or do reproduce--we are not unique in our biological needs to do just that--"natalists" is just a short hop to demonization or worse. Or have you already made that hop, perhaps?
Well said, I’ve started (tongue-in-cheek) identifying as a natalist just on account of disagreeing strongly with the unhinged anti-natalist perspective rampant in online culture. I also want to have kids, think it’s fine if others do not share this view, but don’t think it’s fine or healthy for others to spew insults at those they disagree with.
How about we focus on fixing the services we have for those already here
You're going to have a hard time fixing anything at all when your population pyramid is inverted. For long term stability you need to have one child per adult. The US currently produces 0.85 children per adult. Innovation dies when all the young peoples' work is going to support a massive geriatric population that only consume.
Climate change is the #2 reason I'm not having kids; I think it's unethical to bring children into a world doomed to war & famine. (The #1 reason is that I don't like being around children.) If you want folks to have more kids, you need to address the reasons they're not having them. As the OP of this thread and myself indicate, environmental concerns are a big reason.
I disagree that there are too many people. Have you read much about the Malthus/George debates? Malthus has now been wrong for 200 years (and counting).
Humor aside, it's a depressing worldview to me that each marginal human is a net negative. I take the opposite view, that each human is a net positive - and we need all the brainpower we can get to solve all of our problems.
We could solve a lot of our problems right now if people were prepared to change how they live and accept a decent amount more responsibility (e.g. sort waste by hand, etc.). Scaling up problems typically hasn't helped, and you get novel issues at large scale (e.g. parasites and diseases thrive due to monoculture in huge farms). As Bill Burr noted, we could all drive tanks to work if there weren't as many of us. It's cynical, but there's more room for largesse at small scale.
We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster.
On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.
We can have growth, but the growth rate must decline over time. For example the current growth rate of world population is around 1.1% per year. It is easy to see that it cannot remain above 1% for more than 12101 years (assuming FTL travel is not discovered).
Proof: Right now every living human is either on Earth or close to Earth. Without FTL it follows that 1 year from now every living human must be within 1 light year of Earth, 2 years from now every living human must be within 2 light years of Earth, and so on. 12101 years from now every living human must be within 12101 years of Earth.
If you calculate the volume of a sphere of radius 12101 light years centered on Earth and divide that volume by what the population would be after 12101 years of 1% annual growth you get 0.04 m^3 per person.
But the volume of an average human is ~0.06 m^3, which is greater than 0.04 m^3.
At 0.1% annual growth it would take a little over 127000 years to run out of room.
At 0.01% annual growth we've got 1.34 million years.
Of course the actual limits are much lower because the above is assuming that we can pack humans so that there is no space that is not occupied by humans which we cannot do because, among other things, (1) our shapes don't fit together perfectly to allow such tight packing, (2) there isn't enough mass in the 12101 light year sphere to make that many humans, and (3) we would need to use much of that space for the infrastructure needed to support humans.
Pyramids were built with slave labor. Poor sanitation lead to the black plague. Imagine if they all stopped having kids, because they thought Egyptian slavery would never end and the black plague was insurmountable?
There is so much vitriol in this statement. The declining birthrate is not as obviously a good thing as you make it out to be, and not everyone shares your cynicism on the state and fate of humanity.
Comments like these don’t add much value, but sure do inject a lot of negativity into these discussions of family and society.
Binary thinking. The question is not whether there are downsides to a declining birthrate (there are) but whether there are even larger downsides to over population (pollution, resource depletion, destruction of other species). Musk's solution is simply find another planet to trash. You simply choose to fiddle as the Earth burns - literally.
No, I simply choose to treat the decisions of others that I disagree with a bit more respect and candor than you do. You are too comfortable with lecturing other individuals, and I doubt you’d communicate like this with a stranger in person.
Especially when the thing you’re criticizing is biologically hardwired result of two people that love one another and want to share a life together.
Anyway, I disagree. Now more than ever it is necessary to examine and weigh the desires of the lizard brain. The lizard brain will never find equilibrium when it has supremacy in its locality and has desires. We know this. We've seen it in nature, and we've lived it ourselves. We're too powerful and capable to be contained by our surroundings, so now we're going to have to think our way out of this or cook the planet.
1. You are right - I probably would not speak to someone in person like that. I apologize.
2. I have a raised a child with some one I love. We made a decision to limit the size of our family for the reasons I stated above. I do not begrudge others making a different decision. I dis-like it when they bemoan the fact that their decision has consequences they don't like.
This is about child safety seats; not the big bench seats that cars used to have where one could more easily arrange the act of conception, than one can in modern cars with bucket seats, consoles, and etc. You could get farther in the back seat of a '72 Cuda than you could on a minivan bench seat.
This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip compared to adults just being able to get in and out on their own.
With one single child I barely notice, but thinking about it it does probably take 2-3 minutes so your 5-10 minutes estimates is probably spot on for multiple kids. Living in a midwestern city and relying on street parking I do dread the loading/unloading in the winter, has there been any attempt at improving this product category on the speed of use dimension?
Mine were able to buckle themselves by at 2.5 or so. It’s not that hard. So even having 4 kids under 6, I rarely had to deal with buckling more than one at a time.
Plus IMO 30 seconds is a better estimate than 2-3 minutes unless they are fighting you or somewhere hard to reach. It’s one check buck and two leg buckles.
I will say that installing car seats is an absolute pain of a task.
My wife and I have a Doona (https://www.doona.com/car-seat-stroller/discover-doona), and we refer to it as a the Ferarri of push chairs. Loading and unloading the stroller (when using their base), is super easy, takes seconds, and we can keep our baby asleep while transporting to/from the car.
pretty much any infant seat is easy to deal with but you can only use those for a year at most. its all the bigger car seats for the next 5-12 years of their lives that are annoying
Speaking to some other kid-having cargo bike owners, one reason they like the cargo bike with the children is that it's significantly easier to get the kids in and out of it.
Not sure why the "don't drive" sibling comment got flagged out of existence, but bikes, transit, and walking don't have the same hassle as driving with children. They entail different hassles, to be sure, but the "get everyone to sit down and buckle them in" tedium isn't one of them.
> It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip
Still better than a dead or handicapped for life kid, that would take much more than a few minutes per day
Having kids always has been a logistical nightmare, and increasingly so thanks to modern lifestyles, the real nightmare is having to depend on cars for everything, that's the root of all evil, the rest is just a natural consequence.
> It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time
Car seats are a minor annoyance. With certain children, managing the headstrong children is time consuming around getting into and out of cars, but car seats themselves are easy.
Unless you are putting them in and and taking them out after every trip, but why would you do that?
I don't know how old your kids are, but mine are 3 & 5 and they can seat and buckle on their own, so that extra time doesn't last for too long at least (seats are mostly annoying when I need to transfer the seats to another car and then back to mine)
... and then it's an even bigger impediment to sharing responsibility for children, as you try to move seats around or make sure grandparents have duplicate equipment. Hard to spontaneously have another parent bring a kid home from school. We had to get special car seats to carpool with my sister, just so we could fit it all in.
These psychological safety burdens - and accompanying negotiations between caretakers - make it so hard to provide mutual aid. We're lucky to have found other parents with similar understandings, but the moralizing on safety makes it hard to even discuss.
There are plenty of narrow car seats that will fit 3 across in any car. I ran 3 Diono Radians in the back seat of a second gen Prius and there was plenty of space. Car seats and cars are the least expensive part of raising young children.
> Car seats and cars are the least expensive part of raising young children.
Yes but cars and driving are so holy to people. While the effect discovered was small, it seems subjectively true to me that people spend way more time thinking about car and car shit than they ought to.
Money and time are fungible on a societal level. If you throw up barriers to entry in the form of time and/or money you will get less of whatever it is you're throwing barriers in front of.
I completely agree with the comment and I have 4 teenagers.
In fact having children has made me more acutely aware of the issue, not less. Because now I have more things I want to do, and face more barriers of both time and money that I have to trade off.
You also have a better quality of life than 100 years ago without needing to spend much money, why would you need extras like health insurance, or an education? Why would your wife (I assume you're a dude) need or god forbid want to work? It's ironic that 100 years ago is your baseline for success, yet you are posting your opinions using such futuristic technology as the Internet.
When I was in market 22 years ago, I'm not sure whether these existed, but if so, nobody at the several different retailers I talked to, nor the local fire department, knew about them. I'm glad to hear that at least one option exists today, although given the pride with which they market their seats, I'm not sure "plenty" is accurate?
Car seats are minor over the long haul, for sure, but they're often the first expense parents face. Especially, as is the focus of this article, parents of two children, who presumably already have many of the non-consumable items they need.
We have google now, and lots and lots of parenting blogs. Googling "3 across car seats" shows that Britax, Chicco and Graco, the big 3 in car seats, all make several extra narrow car seats for packing kids in to smaller cars. Diono was the first to focus on narrow seats, but there's a whole aisle at most retailers for them.
> Enthusiasm for these laws has not been curbed by studies showing that child car seats are no more effective than seat belts in preventing death or serious injury for children above age two (e.g. Levitt 2008, Doyle and Levitt 2010).
Like many of the other Freakonomics conclusions, this one is at best oversimplified, and at worst actively dangerous. To simply quote it as uncontested fact is ridiculously incompetent.
Without even jumping into the detail of the study, for most toddlers under 3 year old with an average height, a three point seatbelt would have the chest strap crossing at neck height.
Irrespective of statistics, common sense would dictate that using your neck region to restrain any human at multiple G's impact, is most definitely not a good idea.
This is a really not that much of a problem unless you have a compact sedan. I have 4 kids. You can fit 3 car seats in the back/middle row of many cars. They make narrow seats for this purpose.
In my experience it’s harder to find a good narrow booster than a narrow five-point-harness car seat. The problem is that boosters don’t have their own belts and can block the seat belt path if seat spacing is tight.
For those that might be unaware, the cited papers are by the Freakenomics Author Steven Levitt and this is a decades long campaign on this with Ted talks and Op-eds and everything.
While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet (can anyone point me to the number of humans earth can sustainably support?), I agree with what the article is saying.
It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no ill effects, and the laws are only selectively enforced. Is there an actual net benefit? And all the while parents have to keep up with increasing and changing laws, which I doubt many do. There's a risk of civil or criminal penalties related to children, and increasing costs (including mental) associated with compliance.
I have a truck. You cannot have more than one rear facing seat in the back if you have two adults in the front. When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short (< 1mi) trips. Safety was a relative term and left to the discretion and best judgment of the participants. I guess it's being increasingly codified, like many other areas of life.
Another thing to point out that many might not know is that the state has an interest in your children and they merely entrust you to raise them to their standards and can take them away if you don't. Many people feel their children are their own to raise as they see fit, but it's more akin to a title of a house - the government owns the rights to the property and merely gives you title to use is so long as you comply with their will/laws.
> Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no ill effects
Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there.
> I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats.
This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable.
"Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there."
There are other traffic differences as well. We can't tie all of it just to the car seat. Even with car seats (and other measures not in MX), it's still a leading cause in the US.
"This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable."
Totally preventable? You do understand that even kids in car seats are susceptible, right?. I was in an accident as a child and had no ill effects. We can play the "could" game all day, like outlawing cars would make all traffic deaths preventable.
Do you have any data on the net benefit of the laws? What percentage of people would not use the devices without the laws? Which instances would the devices be beneficial - the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4, and note that rear facing is still a safer form of travel, so should we have cars with all rear facing seats except for the driver? Sure there are preventable deaths that could be avoid this way. Where is the line drawn and why? How many people's lives have been ruined by enforcement of the laws.
> There are other traffic differences as well. We can't tie all of it just to the car seat. Even with car seats (and other measures not in MX), it's still a leading cause in the US.
In the US, the absolute number (not just the rates) of child deaths as vehicle passengers have dropped almost monotically since 1989, to less than half by 2019 what they were in 1989.
> the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4,
details vary by state, but beyond age 4, most states only require boosters (to deal with shoulder belt height) which do not have the bulk or other issues of safety seats, not actual safety seats. (In some states, this is actually earlier than age 4.) So, while abandoning rules isn't going to have much benefit on fertility, if the burden of safety seats is the source of the problem you are trying to address.
Trajectory to what exactly? I can't find anything about the sustainable carrying capacity, only the max which seems to be unsustainable based on current scenarios.
Trajectory toward a long, slow population collapse. It's hard to imagine what gets world population back up to replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) once it dips below. Children are expensive and technology makes having them far more optional than it ever has been in history. The world's population is aging out of its fertility years. Once we're below 2.1 the trajectory will be down, short of some severe cultural or societal change.
The environment will be ok. Concerns about overpopulation destroying sustainability are 'fighting the last war.'
Perhaps the relatively short term pains of population collapse will be a net benefit in the long term - forcing economic systems and society to change in ways that support longer term stability with better quality of life.
> When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short (< 1mi) trips. Safety was a relative term and left to the discretion and best judgment of the participants.
This is a great example of literal survivorship bias
Yes, and so is the fact that we don't all ride rear facing, or that we have cars at all.
The point is to draw a line somewhere that makes sense. The Overton window has been shifting an a rapidly increasing pace for child "safety" laws in the past two decades or so. If we make it an absolute about "Even one child", then we ignore promoting net benefit and can end up with detrimental effects, which is essentially the point of the article.
I don't disagree there's some medium there, but I think we can both agree that despite the Overton window shifting we probably won't consider riding in the bed of a pickup acceptable child safety.
As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?
"we probably won't consider riding in the bed of a pickup acceptable child safety."
On a private road (my example) at low speeds <15mph, it seems acceptable to me, especially with older kids (not talking about <7 or so). This is quite common in some areas and really shouldn't be a safety issue.
"As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?"
Which is covered in the article and goes over the inconvenience and how that leads to lower birth rates. For example, as those kids get older and are spaced out you have a logistical issue due to different age groups meaning different friend groups and different sports teams.
If you're responding to my comment about everyone being rear facing in the prior comment, my point is that being rear facing is safer even for adults yet we don't enforce that in car design. Thus the laws are largely not based on safety but on society's views of what is safe enough. With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
> On a private road (my example) at low speeds <15mph, it seems acceptable to me, especially with older kids (not talking about <7 or so). This is quite common in some areas and really shouldn't be a safety issue.
OK, so that's an anecdote entirely unrelated to the question at hand regarding child seats.
> With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
Well unfortunately for them they are responsible for another human being. It's not just their own self interest in question, and when the other party can't effectively advocate for itself it only makes sense to create minimum standards of care.
It's not entirely unrelated as it's on the topic of child safety laws related to vehicles. It's proving a point - that the knee-jerk reaction of banning something that "must not be safe" can be an overreaction.
Yes, they are responsible for aborher human. The question is who sets those minimum standards and what should they be. If the caregiver can't be trusted with simple everyday things like this, then can they be entrusted with this child at all?
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view. My parents moved between states a week after I was born and for the entire 12 hour trip my mom held me in her lap in the front seat. When we made short trips in-town, we as kids would get to sit in the "way back" of a hatchback without seatbelts (or even seats) as a treat.
Neither of these were optimal safety choices. We were definitely at a higher risk of death or injury. If everyone did this society wide, the number of child fatalities in traffic accidents *would* be higher. Yes, people who relate such anecdotes and then say, "...and we survived" are literally demonstrating survivorship bias.
Times change and I don't think I'd make these same safety trade-offs with my kids. I'm also not sure taking these kind of risk/reward trade-off decisions out of the hands of parents is a net positive either.
It's hard to talk about whether the current status quo is reasonable because for many of us, that status quo predates us and "wait, you're saying you are FOR more kids dying in car wrecks" is a pretty natural reaction. For that reason, I think it's easier to consider the reasonableness of an incremental, hypothetical change to the current status quo. Imagine a study comes out tomorrow that shows that children in wrecks have a 3% higher fatality rate in cars manufactured before 2015, so a law is passed saying that as of 2024 driving a pre-2015 car with children in it will be a ticketable offense. Is there anything that would give you pause about this scenario, is it an unalloyed good thing, or is it another "I mean, I GUESS it's for the best, it's complicated tbh" situation?
Very funny: we had a hard time finding a car wide enough to accomodate three child safety seats without being too long to park..
Now our children are getting older so this is less an issue, but (Europeans) car are still quite bad for three children: the one in the middle has often a reduced place and/or an unconfortable seat.
People who haven't actually tried, or haven't had kids at all, really don't grasp how problematic three car seats across actually is. Car seats are wider than most adults, and there's little standardization (either car or seat design).
So you're often left looking for articles or anecdotes that list both specific vehicles with a specific make/model of car seat. It does exist, it is just painful and annoying.
Even shops that sell car seats and will let you "test fit" them rarely have three of the same model to demo.
Otherwise it doesn't fit.
So far so good?
No! The middle seatbelt isn't long enough so we had to buy an extension, which in theory is illegal in France :-(
And don't get me started on the stupid 'foot trunks'..
Gosh, yes. When my third child was due to be born, I was driving a 1998 Toyota Camry, a mid-sized car, and it was literally impossible to fit three carseats into the backseat. To accommodate a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn, we had to upsize to a minivan. There was no lesser option!
Maybe it’s different in Europe. In the US it’s pretty easy to find narrow car seats that can fit three across, in my experience. We just went on Amazon and bought them.
Depends on how you define "resources". The planet's natural resources do not intrinsically increase with every child born, however, the planet's intellectual and problem-solving resources do increase with each child born (*depending on the quality of parents the child was born to).
They argue against car seat requirements by pointing out that they don't work as well for older kids, but it's precisely the lack of requirements that result in booster seats not performing as well. No one makes any that standout as better, because they aren't required to. Likely, you aren't going to get better performance without using a 5 point harness, but the market for something like that would be far to small to maintain, so we don't get a choice. I'm not arguing that we should require 5 point harnesses for 8 year olds, but I am pointing out that we didn't have the option to buy infant car seats, as effective as they are now, before requirements were put in place.
It's not an issue of lacking anchors, in my experience. It's that there doesn't exist (AFAIK) a car wide enough to accommodate three carseats side-by-side. Carseats are very wide.
The average slim carseat is 17" wide. Not just any car seat, but a slim one. It's a whole category of seats. That means 3 side-by-side car seats require 51" of rear hip and rear shoulder room, which is really very doable. In modern cars, your choices include a Subaru Impreza, a Mazda 3, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Sentra, Ford Focus, BMW 3 series, Audi a4.. I could go on, but basically every manufacturer's smallest car.
Yes, you can't fit 3 of Graco's convertable car seat/stroller/play place/activity centers into a typical sedan, but if you plan ahead you can do it easily.
Okay, this is a new category of product that didn't exist when I first shopped for carseats.
I suppose now the primary issue is that one might have to plan ahead and buy slim carseats from the beginning, since as I recall it, the process was: buy a baby seat, turn it around, then buy a bigger seat passing the baby seat down for the next one, turn that one around, then buy a second bigger seat, and... that's the point of issue unless one planned ahead--or plans to buy all-new seats.
I’ve heard that car seats expire anyway if you are following the rules.
It is true that you will probably need to plan ahead and buy slim car seats. But even if you don’t, three car seats is still far less expensive than many other child things. Three car seats is less than half as expensive as daycare for a single child for a single month, in my area at least.
I have no kids nor have I ever had to transport kids so have no experience in this area, but I would guess it would be possible to design a multi-child car seat that can fit N kids in less space than N 1-child car seats.
A bit of Googling turns up a company doing that [1], but those are not legal in the US. They are legal in Europe, though. Does Europe have looser standards for child car seats? Do US standards preclude doing something like this in the US?
The Multimac 1000 fits 3 kids in the back seat of a Fiat 500.
This article argues that the birthrate is too low, and that car seats discourage couples from having more than two children. It doesn't seem to offer any justification for the idea that this is the right way to adjust the birthrate (versus, for example, addressing some of the challenges that stop couples from having children in the first place).
I don't take the article as saying this is THE way to adjust birthrate.
They're just highlighting a case where a) they believe regulation is depressing fertility rates and b) the author presents the regulation as not very effective at improving safety outcomes. So the justification for making the change is:
> It is often said that governments can do little to increase the birth rate.
> I find this implausible. We do lots of things as the government that decrease the birth rate. We could Stop It. Or do the opposite.
The article advocates that loosening car seat restrictions for older children is a way the government could improve fertility rates just by ceasing an action it is currently taking ("Stopping It").
I think rock climbing is the best thing ever. In the long run, the experience of rock climbing will spiritually reinvigorate the public. I want more people to rock climb. It’s the knots that are the problem. They take so long to tie, and every gym you go to makes you take tests to make sure you know how to tie them and then vocally double check that they are secure. Studies show that if people didn’t have to spend time tying knots, they’d be more inclined to try rock climbing. At the same time, studies show that excessive safety standards only save a handful of rock climbers each year. It’s not worth it. We should remove any regulations around ropes and knots for rock climbing gyms so more people will rock climb.
Thank you, I’m glad I’m not the only one; this seems like insanity to compare forecasted potential birth numbers with actual child fatalities. Could car seat regulations be erring on the side of over-zealousness? Sure, but the way to show that is that the safety isn’t increased, not to say “think of the potentially born!”
Apparently, West Virginia doesn't enforce this. The only requirement is that parents properly secure any child under age 6 in a seat (https://carseattraveler.com/west-virginia-car-seat-laws/). So we should see higher birth rates in that state (I doubt it).
Hum I think I read a while ago an article on how the limited constraints/rules there where in the US for child seats were causing many unneeded death, compared to the EU where we have iSize/isofix/etc. But I cannot find the article now.
Also I'm not sure what this comparison between the number of lives saved and the number of births not happening is worth. Where in the world is it a fine to sacrifice baby lives so that more people can be born? Feels like they are optimizing cattle ^^
I propose an alternative: we should get our society more independent of cars. Physical activity by walking and cycling around instead of sitting all day also increases health and with it fertility.
One could also argue that the U.S.'s lack of affordable high-quality mass transit reduces fertility. And probably by a lot more than having to use a car seat. Owning a car is roughly as expensive as raising one child for 18 years, especially if there's any consideration given to using newer cars with higher safety standards.
Cutting to the core of the article, though, is it any wonder that a hypercapitalist society doesn't prefer having children? There's no contract saying that children must contribute back to their parents in any economic way so they are a poor investment compared to bonds or stocks. A large fraction of children go to college (often at their parents' expense) and move out of the local community, newly minted economic units destined to enrich the already super-rich with their labor, which promises no tangible benefits to potential parents. The article touches on the lack of economic incentives for higher fertility but seems to treat it as more of an externality than a fundamental problem. Children used to be a capital investment and are now a cost center.
Car seat use reduces the risk for injury in a crash by 71–82% for children, when compared with seat belt use alone.
Booster seat use reduces the risk for serious injury by 45% for children age 4–8, when compared with seat belt use alone.
This is an odd hobby horse. I’m neutral on a birth rate increase but this smacks of treating symptoms of economic stress.
If you’re in a situation as a society where your income as real purchase power is rising then the solution to this problem is to buy another car (which people do anyway) or outsource your transport. At one point the author mentions some people dislike minivans. If avoiding minivans and SUVs is the reason to avoid a third child, I doubt their heart was in it. Most of the top ten vehicles sold this year are large, expensive, SUVs and Trucks.
That’s not the situation we’re in as a country.
Housing is a larger expense and more broadly felt problem than car seats. There are some comparable increases in birth rate linked to decreases in home prices i the linked NBER paper.
Real Wages are flat for most.
Is that car seat really the deal breaker if the rest of expenses for a third child can’t be covered?
It's fascinating how deeply automobiles affect every aspect of our lives to the point where seatbelt vs safety seat even matters. To consider a world without significant car commuting each day seems insane to most people because it's what we grew up with and take for granted, as our population grows and new suburbs expand outwards we just need more roads and more cars. What are the alternatives? A different approach to society and urban planning that minimised commute distance between essential locations within cohorts would surely result in far fewer road fatalities but it does seem like few people are willing to make the lifestyle changes needed.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] threadHow about we focus on fixing the services we have for those already here
You're going to have a hard time fixing anything at all when your population pyramid is inverted. For long term stability you need to have one child per adult. The US currently produces 0.85 children per adult. Innovation dies when all the young peoples' work is going to support a massive geriatric population that only consume.
Find another way to fix things before it's too late.
Humor aside, it's a depressing worldview to me that each marginal human is a net negative. I take the opposite view, that each human is a net positive - and we need all the brainpower we can get to solve all of our problems.
On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.
But will we?
We probably will continue to expand though.
Some countries don't have unfunded liabilities that can share some of their population so we can keep the Ponzi scheme going.
Proof: Right now every living human is either on Earth or close to Earth. Without FTL it follows that 1 year from now every living human must be within 1 light year of Earth, 2 years from now every living human must be within 2 light years of Earth, and so on. 12101 years from now every living human must be within 12101 years of Earth.
If you calculate the volume of a sphere of radius 12101 light years centered on Earth and divide that volume by what the population would be after 12101 years of 1% annual growth you get 0.04 m^3 per person.
But the volume of an average human is ~0.06 m^3, which is greater than 0.04 m^3.
At 0.1% annual growth it would take a little over 127000 years to run out of room.
At 0.01% annual growth we've got 1.34 million years.
Of course the actual limits are much lower because the above is assuming that we can pack humans so that there is no space that is not occupied by humans which we cannot do because, among other things, (1) our shapes don't fit together perfectly to allow such tight packing, (2) there isn't enough mass in the 12101 light year sphere to make that many humans, and (3) we would need to use much of that space for the infrastructure needed to support humans.
Comments like these don’t add much value, but sure do inject a lot of negativity into these discussions of family and society.
Especially when the thing you’re criticizing is biologically hardwired result of two people that love one another and want to share a life together.
Anyway, I disagree. Now more than ever it is necessary to examine and weigh the desires of the lizard brain. The lizard brain will never find equilibrium when it has supremacy in its locality and has desires. We know this. We've seen it in nature, and we've lived it ourselves. We're too powerful and capable to be contained by our surroundings, so now we're going to have to think our way out of this or cook the planet.
2. I have a raised a child with some one I love. We made a decision to limit the size of our family for the reasons I stated above. I do not begrudge others making a different decision. I dis-like it when they bemoan the fact that their decision has consequences they don't like.
Plus IMO 30 seconds is a better estimate than 2-3 minutes unless they are fighting you or somewhere hard to reach. It’s one check buck and two leg buckles.
I will say that installing car seats is an absolute pain of a task.
Not sure why the "don't drive" sibling comment got flagged out of existence, but bikes, transit, and walking don't have the same hassle as driving with children. They entail different hassles, to be sure, but the "get everyone to sit down and buckle them in" tedium isn't one of them.
Still better than a dead or handicapped for life kid, that would take much more than a few minutes per day
Having kids always has been a logistical nightmare, and increasingly so thanks to modern lifestyles, the real nightmare is having to depend on cars for everything, that's the root of all evil, the rest is just a natural consequence.
Car seats are a minor annoyance. With certain children, managing the headstrong children is time consuming around getting into and out of cars, but car seats themselves are easy.
Unless you are putting them in and and taking them out after every trip, but why would you do that?
These psychological safety burdens - and accompanying negotiations between caretakers - make it so hard to provide mutual aid. We're lucky to have found other parents with similar understandings, but the moralizing on safety makes it hard to even discuss.
They are my biggest investment.
Yes, properly fastening the youngest ones is a hassle, but one I'll happily take again and again as long as necessary.
Yes but cars and driving are so holy to people. While the effect discovered was small, it seems subjectively true to me that people spend way more time thinking about car and car shit than they ought to.
Car seats are just one example of a barrier.
I completely agree with the comment and I have 4 teenagers.
In fact having children has made me more acutely aware of the issue, not less. Because now I have more things I want to do, and face more barriers of both time and money that I have to trade off.
We’re debating the merits of reducing the bump while ignoring the much much bigger issues.
Because no one is setting their expectations (including child welfare agencies) on “what was practical 100 years ago”.
I think only: can I afford this? What will I need to give up to afford this? Is it worth it?
Car seats are minor over the long haul, for sure, but they're often the first expense parents face. Especially, as is the focus of this article, parents of two children, who presumably already have many of the non-consumable items they need.
Like many of the other Freakonomics conclusions, this one is at best oversimplified, and at worst actively dangerous. To simply quote it as uncontested fact is ridiculously incompetent.
For convenience, I’ll just link to the breathless (but sourced) assessment of the earlier study by a pediatrician at https://thecarseatlady.com/freakonomics-fallacy-an-economist...
Irrespective of statistics, common sense would dictate that using your neck region to restrain any human at multiple G's impact, is most definitely not a good idea.
The problem comes when you have multiple small children that need an actual fixed car seat.
In my experience it’s harder to find a good narrow booster than a narrow five-point-harness car seat. The problem is that boosters don’t have their own belts and can block the seat belt path if seat spacing is tight.
Yes! Thank you!
They are about as bad as Malcolm Gladwell. And yet I know plenty of finance guys who take it as gospel.
It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no ill effects, and the laws are only selectively enforced. Is there an actual net benefit? And all the while parents have to keep up with increasing and changing laws, which I doubt many do. There's a risk of civil or criminal penalties related to children, and increasing costs (including mental) associated with compliance.
I have a truck. You cannot have more than one rear facing seat in the back if you have two adults in the front. When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short (< 1mi) trips. Safety was a relative term and left to the discretion and best judgment of the participants. I guess it's being increasingly codified, like many other areas of life.
Another thing to point out that many might not know is that the state has an interest in your children and they merely entrust you to raise them to their standards and can take them away if you don't. Many people feel their children are their own to raise as they see fit, but it's more akin to a title of a house - the government owns the rights to the property and merely gives you title to use is so long as you comply with their will/laws.
Edit: why disagree?
Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there.
> I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats.
This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable.
There are other traffic differences as well. We can't tie all of it just to the car seat. Even with car seats (and other measures not in MX), it's still a leading cause in the US.
"This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable."
Totally preventable? You do understand that even kids in car seats are susceptible, right?. I was in an accident as a child and had no ill effects. We can play the "could" game all day, like outlawing cars would make all traffic deaths preventable.
Do you have any data on the net benefit of the laws? What percentage of people would not use the devices without the laws? Which instances would the devices be beneficial - the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4, and note that rear facing is still a safer form of travel, so should we have cars with all rear facing seats except for the driver? Sure there are preventable deaths that could be avoid this way. Where is the line drawn and why? How many people's lives have been ruined by enforcement of the laws.
In the US, the absolute number (not just the rates) of child deaths as vehicle passengers have dropped almost monotically since 1989, to less than half by 2019 what they were in 1989.
> the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4,
details vary by state, but beyond age 4, most states only require boosters (to deal with shoulder belt height) which do not have the bulk or other issues of safety seats, not actual safety seats. (In some states, this is actually earlier than age 4.) So, while abandoning rules isn't going to have much benefit on fertility, if the burden of safety seats is the source of the problem you are trying to address.
We are on that trajectory now. No need to do anything special. It's baked into demographics and unavoidable at this point.
https://quillette.com/2022/08/20/the-unexpected-future/
The environment will be ok. Concerns about overpopulation destroying sustainability are 'fighting the last war.'
This is a great example of literal survivorship bias
The point is to draw a line somewhere that makes sense. The Overton window has been shifting an a rapidly increasing pace for child "safety" laws in the past two decades or so. If we make it an absolute about "Even one child", then we ignore promoting net benefit and can end up with detrimental effects, which is essentially the point of the article.
As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?
On a private road (my example) at low speeds <15mph, it seems acceptable to me, especially with older kids (not talking about <7 or so). This is quite common in some areas and really shouldn't be a safety issue.
"As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?"
Which is covered in the article and goes over the inconvenience and how that leads to lower birth rates. For example, as those kids get older and are spaced out you have a logistical issue due to different age groups meaning different friend groups and different sports teams.
If you're responding to my comment about everyone being rear facing in the prior comment, my point is that being rear facing is safer even for adults yet we don't enforce that in car design. Thus the laws are largely not based on safety but on society's views of what is safe enough. With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
OK, so that's an anecdote entirely unrelated to the question at hand regarding child seats.
> With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
Well unfortunately for them they are responsible for another human being. It's not just their own self interest in question, and when the other party can't effectively advocate for itself it only makes sense to create minimum standards of care.
Yes, they are responsible for aborher human. The question is who sets those minimum standards and what should they be. If the caregiver can't be trusted with simple everyday things like this, then can they be entrusted with this child at all?
Neither of these were optimal safety choices. We were definitely at a higher risk of death or injury. If everyone did this society wide, the number of child fatalities in traffic accidents *would* be higher. Yes, people who relate such anecdotes and then say, "...and we survived" are literally demonstrating survivorship bias.
Times change and I don't think I'd make these same safety trade-offs with my kids. I'm also not sure taking these kind of risk/reward trade-off decisions out of the hands of parents is a net positive either.
It's hard to talk about whether the current status quo is reasonable because for many of us, that status quo predates us and "wait, you're saying you are FOR more kids dying in car wrecks" is a pretty natural reaction. For that reason, I think it's easier to consider the reasonableness of an incremental, hypothetical change to the current status quo. Imagine a study comes out tomorrow that shows that children in wrecks have a 3% higher fatality rate in cars manufactured before 2015, so a law is passed saying that as of 2024 driving a pre-2015 car with children in it will be a ticketable offense. Is there anything that would give you pause about this scenario, is it an unalloyed good thing, or is it another "I mean, I GUESS it's for the best, it's complicated tbh" situation?
So you're often left looking for articles or anecdotes that list both specific vehicles with a specific make/model of car seat. It does exist, it is just painful and annoying.
Even shops that sell car seats and will let you "test fit" them rarely have three of the same model to demo.
X
__X
Otherwise it doesn't fit. So far so good? No! The middle seatbelt isn't long enough so we had to buy an extension, which in theory is illegal in France :-(
And don't get me started on the stupid 'foot trunks'..
Carseats are incredibly wide.
Yes, you can't fit 3 of Graco's convertable car seat/stroller/play place/activity centers into a typical sedan, but if you plan ahead you can do it easily.
I suppose now the primary issue is that one might have to plan ahead and buy slim carseats from the beginning, since as I recall it, the process was: buy a baby seat, turn it around, then buy a bigger seat passing the baby seat down for the next one, turn that one around, then buy a second bigger seat, and... that's the point of issue unless one planned ahead--or plans to buy all-new seats.
It is true that you will probably need to plan ahead and buy slim car seats. But even if you don’t, three car seats is still far less expensive than many other child things. Three car seats is less than half as expensive as daycare for a single child for a single month, in my area at least.
A bit of Googling turns up a company doing that [1], but those are not legal in the US. They are legal in Europe, though. Does Europe have looser standards for child car seats? Do US standards preclude doing something like this in the US?
The Multimac 1000 fits 3 kids in the back seat of a Fiat 500.
[1] https://www.multimac.com/home
I’d guess they either don’t want to go through the US regulatory approval process or simply aren’t ready to do so yet. It’s massively painful.
They're just highlighting a case where a) they believe regulation is depressing fertility rates and b) the author presents the regulation as not very effective at improving safety outcomes. So the justification for making the change is:
> It is often said that governments can do little to increase the birth rate.
> I find this implausible. We do lots of things as the government that decrease the birth rate. We could Stop It. Or do the opposite.
The article advocates that loosening car seat restrictions for older children is a way the government could improve fertility rates just by ceasing an action it is currently taking ("Stopping It").
Safety regulations are one of those things. Thats why there's been a decades long propaganda campaign against Health and Safety laws and regulations.
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertaria...
we already have that.
>Bouldering is a form of free climbing that is performed on small rock formations or artificial rock walls without the use of ropes or harnesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldering
Also I'm not sure what this comparison between the number of lives saved and the number of births not happening is worth. Where in the world is it a fine to sacrifice baby lives so that more people can be born? Feels like they are optimizing cattle ^^
Cutting to the core of the article, though, is it any wonder that a hypercapitalist society doesn't prefer having children? There's no contract saying that children must contribute back to their parents in any economic way so they are a poor investment compared to bonds or stocks. A large fraction of children go to college (often at their parents' expense) and move out of the local community, newly minted economic units destined to enrich the already super-rich with their labor, which promises no tangible benefits to potential parents. The article touches on the lack of economic incentives for higher fertility but seems to treat it as more of an externality than a fundamental problem. Children used to be a capital investment and are now a cost center.
If you’re in a situation as a society where your income as real purchase power is rising then the solution to this problem is to buy another car (which people do anyway) or outsource your transport. At one point the author mentions some people dislike minivans. If avoiding minivans and SUVs is the reason to avoid a third child, I doubt their heart was in it. Most of the top ten vehicles sold this year are large, expensive, SUVs and Trucks.
That’s not the situation we’re in as a country.
Housing is a larger expense and more broadly felt problem than car seats. There are some comparable increases in birth rate linked to decreases in home prices i the linked NBER paper.
Real Wages are flat for most.
Is that car seat really the deal breaker if the rest of expenses for a third child can’t be covered?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17485
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041...
https://money.com/child-care-costs-declining-birth-rate/