How Much Do We Really Care About Children? | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 447

They can’t vote or hire lobbyists. The policies we create to help them aren’t always so helpful. Consider the car seat: parents hate it, the safety data are unconvincing, and new evidence suggests an unintended consequence that is as anti-child as it gets. This episode was originally published January 13, 2021. For a full transcript, resources, and more, visit: https://freak.ws/3CD9OsQ Photo credit: Audrey Bernstein FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. Stephen Dubner. You are about to hear our first new episode of 2021. We have a big year planned for Freakonomics Radio and our whole little podcast network, including occasional episodes of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, which has proved to be very popular. Reading ahead is not at all a requirement, but if you would like to do so, the next book we're doing is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty. She is a mortician and self-described funeral industry rabble-rouser. It is a fascinating book and a great episode. You're gonna love it. And now on to today's episode.

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would you say if I told you there's a safety device that just about every parent is required to buy, but many of them hate?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  They are terrible. I have a hate-hate relationship with this sucker. They're horrible.

• 1:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that this safety device doesn't really seem to improve safety?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  They were so shocked by the results that they thought there must have been a mistake.

• 1:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what if I told you that this device, designed to protect children, had the unintended consequence of causing fewer children to be born?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  If you look at the whole time series, you get to about 145,000 fewer births.

• 1:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once I told you all that, would you know what I'm talking about? It is a simple, two-word answer.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Car seats. Car seats. Car sheets. I hate car seats.

• 1:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what does the car seat story tell us about how we treat children generally?

• 1:38Speaker 05

  I feel very strongly that kids get short-tripped in our policy and political environment.

• 1:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much do we really care about children? That's coming up right after this.

• 2:04Speaker 06

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have any children or things like that?

• 2:21Speaker 05

  I do. I have three children. They are currently ages 15, 13, and 10. We bought a minivan as soon as I was pregnant with our second kid, actually. It was definitely a good day in my life when no kids needed a car seat.

• 2:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why? What was it about the car seat ecosystem that made it undesirable or unpleasant?

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Honestly, it's a hassle. Like, I just want to run into the grocery store and get two things, and I gotta unbuckle three kids and pick them up and put them out, and then I gotta buckle them back in. It's also a hassle because you can't readily have someone else drive your kid around. You have to move the car seat into their car.

• 3:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Melissa Carney is an economics professor at the University of Maryland. Most of her research has to do with child poverty and questions around what academics like to call "family formation."

• 3:14Speaker 05

  Some people sort of look askance when economists ask these kinds of questions. And some economists would say, "This is the purview of sociology." Actually, some sociologists would say, "This is the purview of sociology." But I think it's important that economists bring our clarity of modeling and our rigor with econometric and empirical techniques to really understand how prices and income and costs and preferences affect family formation and fertility decisions.

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carney has been on our show in the past. She once told us about the educational benefits of Sesame Street. She told us how a lottery-linked savings plan can help low-income families increase their savings. She told us how the fracking boom led to more babies, but fewer marriages, and how this was part of a larger trend.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  So in 1960, 5% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers.

• 4:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  And in recent years?

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Over 40% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers.

• 4:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lately, Carney has been looking at how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect family formation in the US.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is work I did with my frequent collaborator, Phil Levine. We are expecting a pretty large baby bust, up to half a million fewer babies being born next year.

• 4:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  We spoke with Carney in late 2020, so half a million fewer babies next year now means this year, 2021. As a share of total births, half a million would be a massive decline.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were like 3.75 million live births in 2019.

• 4:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  How did Carney and Levine reach their pandemic baby bust estimate of a half million? First, they looked at employment data. When employment spikes, as it did in the fracking boom, births tend to rise also. When employment drops, as it has during the pandemic, births tend to drop. When they analyzed employment and birth data from the Great Recession, for instance.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  The relationship looks quite linear. It's like one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 1% reduction in births. So, you know, the unemployment rate on account of this pandemic is way up. Let's say, over the course of the year, it's a 7 to 10 percentage point increase in unemployment. Just based on the recession effects alone, we would expect a 7 to 10% reduction in births.

• 5:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  But of course, a recession isn't the only damage that's been caused by this pandemic. So for a deeper historical parallel, Carney and Levine looked at what happened to the US birth rate after the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  We looked back at what happened to say, does the public health crisis itself exert a downward force on birth rates?

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  That pandemic, they found, produced a baby bust of around 12%.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  And there's two things that are really noteworthy about that. The first is the Spanish flu did not have an associated recession because of the war effort. So this was a response due solely to the public health crisis. And two, people didn't have access to advanced contraceptive technology back in 1920 the way they do now, and yet they still reduce their births.

• 6:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so factoring those responses into the current pandemic with its unemployment spike of seven to 10 percentage points.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  So we up our estimate and we say, maybe we should expect a 10 to 13% reduction in births. And based on annual birth rates, that leads us to predict 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year.

• 6:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And of course, it may extend beyond one year's worth of decline, correct?

• 6:57Speaker 05

  Exactly. One might say, well, people are just delaying births until things recover. I suspect that many of these delayed births will wind up being permanent because the recovery is likely to be pretty lengthy and slow. And so some women biologically will age out of having more kids. But even the ones who don't, they and/or their partner might experience persistent loss in income, right? To the extent that this pandemic recession translates into permanent income losses, I expect that some of this will be permanent. If this is true for a number of years, then we have a fairly large reduction in births

• 7:38Speaker 05

  over a longer cohort that has demographic implications for the workforce. Now, a silver lining, perhaps that's a bit flip, but smaller cohort size would mean smaller class sizes in school, less competition for limited college slots. So those individuals might benefit in that way.

• 8:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  The COVID baby bust Carney is predicting wouldn't be so noteworthy if not for this fact. The US birth rate before the pandemic was at an all time low. As of 2019, the total fertility rate was 1.7. That's 1.7 babies born per woman of childbearing age over her lifetime. During the baby boom after World War II, the US fertility rate was more than 3.7. So more than double the recent rate. And again, that was before the pandemic. The so-called replacement fertility rate, what some people call the optimal rate, is 2.1. That is the rate needed to keep a population steady,

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  although population is, of course, affected by migration as well. Some countries gain population by migration, some lose. The US is a perennial gainer, although those numbers have also fallen lately due to both policy and the pandemic. The US is not alone in having fallen below the replacement rate.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  So the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime has been falling. The number of babies born each year per 1,000 women has been falling. And this is true for many, if not most, high-income countries.

• 9:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most of Europe is well below the replacement rate. So are Japan, Singapore, and the UAE. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 1.1. Last year, for the first time, it registered more deaths than births. Now, there may be upsides to a declining global birth rate since overpopulation presents a variety of resource and economic challenges. But there are problems when you get below the replacement rate, too.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  Fewer kids born skews the age distribution older. And in fact, in the US, the average age and the age distribution of the population has been getting older because people are living longer and having fewer babies. So you're getting pressures on both sides. 15% of our population is over the age of 65. The two big reasons in my mind as to why that matters are, one, because of productivity. A younger workforce is generally more productive. The fact that the population is skewing older means we have a lower employment-to-population ratio. So that is bad for productivity and overall GDP growth.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  The second real issue is that having an aging population puts pressure on our social insurance systems. And that threatens the solvency of those systems. And to be clear, this is not a uniquely US challenge.

• 10:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  What are the causes of this global birth decline?

• 10:50Speaker 05

  There's no obvious, single explanation for why childbearing rates have been falling. I think the two most likely explanations, though it's really hard to nail down in the data, economic opportunities for women have expanded. And for many women, having a career is in conflict with having kids or more kids. And access to really effective contraception has been improving. So the combination of those two trends, those are my best guesses as to why we've seen fertility declining in most high-income countries.

• 11:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is the cost of child raising and the cost of having a family generally, everything from housing to education, a significant contributor to the lower fertility rate? Or is that too hard to know?

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Kids do look like they are what economists call "normal goods." So when people get more money and they can afford more kids, they have more of them. And when the cost associated with having kids goes up, people have fewer of them.

• 12:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  There is another pair of academic researchers who have come across another child-rearing cost, which they argue has also contributed to the birth decline.

• 12:12Speaker 07

  My name is Jordan Nickerson. I am a financial economist visiting MIT.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  I'm David Solomon, and I'm an associate professor of finance at the Boston College Carroll School of Management.

• 12:23Speaker 07

  This essentially started out of a conversation, just an anecdotal account from one of Dave's friends. He brought up these crazy costs of having children. And he pointed out needing to get a minivan to fit the kids if they wanted to have a big family. And this was not something he was particularly willing to do.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  And it's really weird when you think about it, because this guy can afford a minivan. But this was one of the things he mentioned, which got me thinking about the project.

• 12:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  The project they got to thinking about began with a hypothesis, a hypothesis about child car seats.

• 12:56Speaker 07

  You know, car seats are bulky items for the average car, the average sedan. It's not going to be able to fit three car seats in the back. And so the prediction would be that when I have two children that are both required to be put in car seats, it's going to make it more difficult to have a third child.

• 13:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  I guess to be devil's advocate, or maybe it's not quite devil's advocate, but it's the advocate of something. I'm thinking any parent or parents who will be discouraged from having a third kid because it's a little bit too much hassle to figure out the car seat arrangement is probably the kind of parent that we should be grateful are not having more children.

• 13:35Speaker 07

  I'm not going to go that far. If this was somebody who had all the means and they still said, you know what, that's just a little too much hassle. Okay, I can see that argument. But at the same time, just realizing there's so many people where every dollar counts. Upgrading to a minivan, that's a non-trivial expense for a large portion of the population.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  It's very rare to find people that say, this was why I didn't have a third child. But it is surprisingly common to find people that say, this was a big pain in the butt. It just has to be a non-trivial cost for someone who was on the margin.

• 14:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does Solomon mean when he says someone who was on the margin? We asked Melissa Carney to explain.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  This is the game economists play. Whenever we say something matters, we always, in our own minds, and sometimes we explicitly say this, mean for people on the margin.

• 14:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning people who might reasonably make a certain decision, but depending on the incentives, might just as reasonably make the opposite decision.

• 14:43Speaker 05

  So there are people for whom you could give them a car, you could give them a fancy Lexus SUV and they're still not going to have a third kid.

• 14:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Those people are not on the margin. Those were not the people David Solomon and Jordan Nickerson were trying to identify. They were trying to identify someone who had two kids and was thinking,

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Well, and then would have to buy a minivan and that would be another 15 grand. And in the scheme of life, 15 grand is much less than you're going to pay for the kid. But that budgets you a little bit.

• 15:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Car seats are required by law in all 50 states and roughly 80 other countries. They're largely absent in Asia and Africa. In case you've never seen or used a child car seat, they are something you buy separately from the car, since the seat belts in cars typically don't adjust to fit a child. They can be fairly complicated contraptions costing up to a few hundred dollars. They are an assemblage of straps and buckles and padding that's secured to the backseat by the car's existing seat belts or a latch buckle. And they're designed to hold a child in place so they won't be tossed around in the event of a crash.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  The first batch of laws started in the early eighties, saying children had to ride in some sort of mandated car safety seat. The early laws applied to like ages one to four. Starting in the mid nineties, you saw a gradual but increasing lift of the minimum age at which you're allowed to just ride in the seat belts.

• 16:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Car seat laws differ from state to state. In California, children up to age nine are required to ride in a car seat or booster seat. In Florida, children age out at six.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  The data sets on car seats came from an extraordinarily painful three weeks or so of manually reading through state legislative histories.

• 16:32Speaker 07

  Basically constructing a entire history of law changes across each state from the early 1980s until 2018.

• 16:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not only do different states have different laws, but those laws were passed at different times. These variations gave Nickerson and Solomon a research opportunity.

• 16:52Speaker 07

  This is going to let us compare states in any given year where the age is four years old to the ages eight years old and look at the rate of third birth fertility.

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  The rate of third birth fertility, meaning how often families who already had two kids were having a third kid and whether the first two kids were still of car seat age. To measure this, they needed to merge the car seat law data with population data.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  The population data sets come from the American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau.

• 17:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  This included information on family makeup, including the number and age of children in every household in the survey. These data could be used to infer fertility decisions for each year in the sample, which could then be measured against state car seat laws to see if car seat requirements were indeed decreasing third birth fertility. What did Nickerson and Solomon think their analysis would predict?

• 17:52Speaker 07

  It's not going to predict that birth rates for all families are going to go down. It's not even going to predict that birth rates for families that have two kids are going to go down. What it really is going to predict is that birth rates are only going to go down for families that have two kids as long as those two kids are below the ages that you need to be in a car seat.

• 18:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  The paper that Nickerson and Solomon wrote and released recently as a working paper is called Car Seats as Contraception.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  I definitely applaud the authors for their creativity.

• 18:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Melissa Carney again.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  I also found the idea that this cost that might strike some as trivial as it being a significant determinant for couples who were on the margin of having three versus two kids, that doesn't strike me as totally implausible.

• 18:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Carney what she thought of their methodology.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  I dug in a little bit on the methodology, but nothing jumped out at me as clearly something the authors might need to change or improve. So I'm open to believing their estimates.

• 19:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So what are the estimates? To what degree have car seats acted as contraception? Here's David Solomon.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  You can think about two numbers. What's the change in birth rates? It's 0.0076. So slightly less than 0.01 children per woman. That sounds small, but bear in mind, that's averaging over women that have no children at all. That's averaging over women that only have one child or four children.

• 19:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So what about the subset of people who do fall in the car seat sweet spot?

• 19:32Speaker 03

  For those people, it's about a 7.8% decline.

• 19:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how does that percentage decline translate to magnitude?

• 19:39Speaker 03

  So if you want to talk magnitudes, the easiest way to think about it is just how many children are we talking total? In 2017, we estimate that there were about 8,000 fewer births as a result of the state of car seat laws in the US.

• 19:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what if you look at the whole time series from the first car seat laws in the early 1980s?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  If you look at the whole time series of the US, you get to about 145,000 fewer births. And 60% of that effect is since 2008, which is a pattern worth noting. Remember, car seat laws have been getting stricter. If current laws had applied since 1980, you would have had 350,000 fewer children born.

• 20:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  To put this in perspective, that's 145,000 fewer births during a period when roughly 150 million babies were born in the US.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  When you think about those numbers, is that a big or a small number? I think it's big enough to move the needle on the fact that we're not talking about a handful of children. And given this is an effect that- I don't think has been thought about very much. It's strange that it's having this large of an effect on total birth when that wasn't even the intention of the policy.

• 20:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the cost of a new bigger vehicle, a minivan or SUV is one thing, but the cost of college or the cost of childcare is obviously much, much more. So do you know any research on how those costs impact decisions to have more children?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Not tightly, no. The reason this isn't a paper about education and housing is that I haven't yet figured out how to measure that tightly. And if I do, I'm going to write it because I think those are hugely important. But with all this stuff, it's very difficult to pin down really tight predictions that are going to withstand criticisms like, isn't this just something about the overall macroeconomy? And the answer is yeah, maybe it is.

• 21:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So by peeling off an incredibly narrow question for which the data were available, Solomon and Nickerson are confident that car seats have, at least to a very small degree, influenced family planning. There is one particularly interesting wrinkle in their research. The overall US birth decline, according to Melissa Carney, has been driven by women at the lower end of the income spectrum, but the car seat decline is driven primarily by higher earners.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Now, that on the one hand might make it sound bogus, like we're just picking up something that's wrong, except I go back to the fact that my friend that first mentioned it, he can afford a minivan. Like he makes enough money, that's not what it's about. And I think honestly, part of it is just class and aesthetic connotations. Like minivans are ugly and that's not the kind of statement you can put in an academic paper, but who would disagree with that?

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who would disagree with that? Melissa Carney would.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  I laughed when I read the line in this paper that people are really averse to driving around in these ugly, uncool minivans. I guess I'm just sufficiently practical that I think the minivan is awesome. It seems to have infinite space, not just for people, but we seem to be able to just throw tons of stuff in the back, slide open the doors.

• 22:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it wasn't a hardship for you in any direction, it sounds like? Yes, style or cost?

• 22:55Speaker 05

  I don't want to be flippant, say that having a third kid wasn't something I thought very hard about, but the minivan was not the holdup for me personally.

• 23:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Different people respond to incentives differently. That's not very surprising. The bigger point here is that incentives matter even when it comes to fertility choices and that an incentive you might never have even considered can have significant unintended consequences. But what about the intended consequence of car seats? That is, their protective ability. Even if car seats are preventing thousands of births, they must be saving many, many lives, right? Right? We'll find out after the break. Also, what other unintended consequences have we been missing?

• 23:47Speaker 05

  I'll give you another one of my favorite policy ideas to hate.

• 24:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  What have we learned so far? The pandemic is expected to produce a significant baby bust. This will be on top of a US birth rate that had already declined to the lowest in history. And one suspected contributor to that decline, albeit a very small contributor, is car seat requirements, which are apparently so onerous as to discourage some parents from having a third child. Here's one parent who wasn't thus discouraged.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  I have six different children, ages 20 down to two.

• 24:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. How did he get around town back when he had four kids under six years old?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  In a trusty minivan, loaded with car seats. And I always had this inkling, so most of my research always comes from inklings, that conventional wisdom might be wrong. And I certainly had this inkling as I strapped my kids into these car seats, which were, especially back then, incredibly hard to install and were flopping around all the time. It just didn't really seem to me that car seats were an obvious solution to the problem.

• 25:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  The problem being that most cars have seat belts designed to fit adults, even in the back seats, where most passengers are kids.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  There's no doubt that an adult seat belt is a terrible Way in general of trying to protect kids in crashes. I mean, it's obvious they don't fit well. They're not designed to fit well. And so it wouldn't be a surprise if kids suffered some injuries when they're in severe crashes using this suboptimal technology.

• 25:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  We should note that when seat belts were introduced back in the 1950s, there was considerable pushback. Some automakers didn't like the idea of adding a device that might accentuate the fact that their products were dangerous. Others began selling them as an optional add on. During a congressional safety hearing in 1957, one congressman asked a Ford executive if seat belts were just another gadget, as he called them, designed to drive up car prices. It would take decades and a lot of laws to drive seatbelt compliance up to the roughly 90% where it is today. The good news is crash data show that seat belts are very effective.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Maybe one of the greatest interventions for saving lives in terms of cost effectiveness we've ever had.

• 26:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But again, they weren't optimized for children. A few carmakers did build adjustable restraint systems and some made an integrated booster seat with a panel that would fold down from or out of the backseat of the car. But the vast majority of cars simply provided adult seat belts. After enough children were thrown from cars during crashes and killed, there arose a movement to do better. And that movement led to the car seat. If you wanted to be cynical, you could look at the car seat solution this way. Three points here. Number one, carmakers were absolved of their duty to safely secure their youngest passengers,

• 27:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  even though roughly 55% of all backseat passengers are 12 years old or younger. Number two, car seat manufacturers were given a bonanza since every parent forevermore would be legally required to buy their product. And number three, all the adults involved in car seat legislation got to feel satisfied that they were doing a great job protecting kids. Let's not rush to cynicism. Let's assume that car seats are a great solution for protecting kids.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Very early on, conventional wisdom became that car seats were an amazing lifesaving device.

• 27:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Levitt had been doing a lot of research about auto safety.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  What jumped out at me was that in the raw data, it appeared that children who were restrained using adult seatbelts seemed to do just as well in car crashes as the kids who were in car seats. And, you know, the raw data aren't everything, you know, they're just a start, but it got me interested in looking further.

• 28:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  When he went to look, he found there hadn't been much research on the performance of car seats. There was one major study from researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  They had used survey data collected after crashes had happened, working in conjunction with a large insurer, where they would call parents on the phone and try to get them to describe what had happened in these crashes.

• 28:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Survey data, as we often say around here, is not the cleanest data.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  In addition to the guilt that parents had around things that had happened to their children in the crash, there's also a question of lawsuits and it's coming from the insurance company and you wonder whether they're doing it because they don't want to pay off your claim or whatever. So there could be real incentives, I think, to not tell the truth.

• 29:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Levitt went looking for better data. NHTSA, that's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, maintains a database called FARs, which stands for Fatality Analysis Reporting System. It contains police reports for every car crash in the US that produces a fatality.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  If you've ever had the misfortune to have been around a fatal crash, they'll shut down the entire highway. They spend hours trying to document what had happened.

• 29:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Levitt also wanted to include non-fatal crashes.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  So there's a national data set called the General Estimate Survey, which is a very small set of all crashes, 50,000 crashes, where they try to collect more detailed data. And then also, New Jersey and Wisconsin have very detailed data sets where they collect for a broader set of crashes. And in addition, in Wisconsin, we were able to link those data up to hospital admissions and discharge data. So we got really detailed information about the kinds of injuries and the length of stays in hospitals and whatnot.

• 30:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Using these data, Levitt went on to publish two research papers. He analyzed the outcomes for children ages two to six. Children under two are nearly always strapped into a car seat. It really isn't practical or advisable to strap a baby into an adult seatbelt. And kids older than six were often done with car seats. So he was focused on the universe of children two to six who had been in a car crash. Some of them were in car seats. Some were restrained with adult seatbelts. And some were not restrained at all. So what did he find? Kids who weren't restrained at all definitely suffered the consequences. But car seats versus seatbelts?

• 30:47Speaker 02

  The comparison between children's car seats and children aged two to six who were wearing adult seatbelts, no matter how I sliced it, I never was able to find any benefit of the car seats in terms of preventing either death or serious injury. Although it is true that in a second paper I wrote with Joe Doyle from MIT, we did find that child car seats are about 25% better at preventing the least serious kinds of injuries in car crashes.

• 31:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  These papers were published in 2005 and 2006.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  I was encouraged to see that a couple authors named Jones and Zibarth wrote a piece in 2017 where they just tried to replicate and extend the first paper, starting from scratch and extending the data the next 10 years in both the existing sample and in the future sample. They found exactly similar results.

• 31:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could it really be that adult seatbelts perform just as well as child car seats in preventing serious injury and death, even though they're not sized for children?

• 31:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  One way to check would be to look at the research done with crash test dummies.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  In fact, every time a car seat wants to get government approval, it's required that they go through a series of crash tests and pass with a minimum threshold of safety in various kinds of impacts. And so I went to look in that literature, expecting to find that there had been lots of research done comparing child car seats to adult seat belts for children in a controlled circumstance with crash test dummies. And what I discovered is that there were literally none.

• 32:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was around the time that Levitt and I published our first Freakonomics book. By now, we were writing a monthly column for the New York Times Magazine. So we thought it might be a good idea for that column to run our own experiment using crash test dummies.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  What I thought was really incredible when we decided to go and actually put some crash test dummies on seats and strapped them into adult seat belts and see what happened in the crashes was the reaction of the crash test sites to doing this. You were there, not me. You wanted to tell that story?

• 32:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, it is true. So it was kind of a two-step amazement. Number one was, it was really, really hard to find a crash test facility that would agree to do this. As it was explained to us over and over again, all our business comes from the car seat manufacturers. There's no good in proving that car seats are not better than seat belts. And then some would say that they weren't set up to do that. But that seemed a little bit odd, because in order to do a car seat crash, you need seat belts. Finally, then, we found a lab that was willing to do it. The caveat was that we were not allowed to identify them by name or where they were. I will say that I flew there, and it was really interesting, because the guy running the lab was a scientist.

• 33:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  And he said, I was really intrigued by this question, because it's something I would really like to know, and I think it's good for the science. So I had bought a couple of different size and brands of new car seats and we started to hook them up and the technician who was installing the crash test dummies in the seat belts didn't want to do it. There were actually two dummies, one that represented a three-year-old child with all these wires to measure the impact of the crash and the other a six-year-old dummy child. And the reason he didn't want to do it is he was so sure that the seat belts would fail and that the crash would like break his dummy.

• 34:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So then I had to sign yet another indemnification form. I was on the hook for all kinds of indemnification in case something went wrong because this wasn't standard testing. And then we ran the tests and the data from the crash test basically came to the conclusion that the seat belt had done pretty close to, if not as good a job as the car seat. And in fact, if you had just submitted the data from the crash where the crash test dummy was in a seat belt alone, that would have easily passed the requirements for it to have been a car seat, even though it was actually just a seat belt.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  And I don't know if you remember, but they were so shocked by the results that they thought there must have been a mistake. And they actually ran it over because they thought that something had to have gone wrong for the seat belt to have done so well.

• 35:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, that's right. Now, we wrote up the results of these tests and your academic research in our Times Common. How would you describe the reception to the news we delivered about car seats?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  I would say somewhere between complete hatred and not even noticing. I mean, my favorite story is when the Secretary of Transportation at the time, Ray LaHood, came across our work. And what he writes in his blog is, quote, "If you want to slice up the data to be provocative, have at it. As a grandfather and a secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety, I don't have that luxury." I mean, like, what the heck? His only job is to keep people safe. And when evidence comes out that maybe the policies that his department has been pushing for the last 20 years are not keeping people safe.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  And he has a staff of statisticians who have literally nothing else to do except to look at data to see if it's keeping people safe. It's amazing to me that the response isn't, hey, let's go show that these quacks are completely wrong. Or, you know, let's actually try to get to the truth. But just to be dismissive of it because it doesn't fit with what they've been doing for 20 years. It was really discouraging.

• 36:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, some officials there, after we published these findings in the New York Times, wrote a letter to the editor. It said, "Our research consistently shows that child safety seats and booster seats significantly lower the risk of serious injury compared to seat belts alone." They go on to say that "your recommendations to rethink car seat laws are, quote, irresponsible and dangerous." So, how do you plead to that? Because you could say, well, maybe car seats are not as good as the authorities say, but as you've said yourself, restraining of some kind for a child in a car is way better than no restraining. So, what's the harm? Do you think you are being irresponsible and dangerous?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  I think what's irresponsible and dangerous is accepting mediocrity, accepting our existing solutions as if they are the best solution. What I take away from the research is we put in all these laws about child car seats and we've built these contraptions, but then when you look at the data, they're really not doing better, certainly not much better, than this other convention, which never had kids in mind and shouldn't work at all.

• 37:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, if you believe Steve Levitt's research, not only are car seats not a great safety device, but if you believe the Jordan Nickerson-David Solomon research, they are also acting as contraception against more children being born.

• 37:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's Solomon.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  For every child's life that's saved by these laws, somewhere between 57 and 141 children aren't born.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  That doesn't seem like the right way to think about it.

• 38:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt again.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Because there's a difference between a conception that never happens and a child whose life is tragically lost. Our goal certainly isn't to maximize the number of people on the planet. Our goal might be to maximize how good the lives are of people who are already born.

• 38:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  So has there at least been improvement in car seat technology?

• 38:32Speaker 08

  I wouldn't say none, but there is very little innovation in that industry today.

• 38:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Shai Mindel. He is an Israeli aeronautics engineer.

• 38:40Speaker 08

  I don't think there has been significant innovation in the last two or three decades, and it's all based on the same seatbelt installation, styrofoam for protection and plastic.

• 38:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  And as any parent can tell you, installing a car seat isn't very intuitive.

• 38:57Speaker 08

  The facts are approximately 70% of the child car seats are not installed correctly, which can lead to devastating results.

• 39:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  He's seen this firsthand.

• 39:06Speaker 08

  I won't mention names, but we tested one of the leading child car seats in the world, and the system simply detached from the base and flew 15 feet in the air. And when we analyzed that, we understood that the engineer in the lab did it installing correctly.

• 39:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Mindel started a company to build a better car seat. It is called Baby Ark. He is certainly not the first person to have this idea. His version uses carbon fiber instead of plastic and some electronics to signal correct installation, as well as to signal parents if they have forgotten to take their child out of the backseat when they leave the car. This is another potential side effect of laws requiring that children ride in seats strapped into the back. It is called forgotten baby syndrome.

• 39:55Speaker 08

  Just the last year in the US alone, 52 kids died from heat stroke in the car. If you leave the kid just for a few minutes, they're very vulnerable and they can unfortunately die.

• 40:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, you might think that big automakers and big car seat manufacturers would have been collaborating all these years to improve things, but we could find little evidence of that.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Now, am I surprised that that hasn't happened?

• 40:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt again.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Not really, because the incentives aren't there. The car seat manufacturers certainly don't want to hand over their pretty lucrative business to the car manufacturers. But I think the car manufacturers also are probably terrified of the legal exposure if they start trying to build their own version of car seats into their seats.

• 40:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So maybe we were right to be cynical earlier. Maybe this car seat situation is a perfect illustration of the insidious way we sometimes settle for solutions that satisfy everyone except the constituency those solutions were intended to help. In this case, children, up to and including the children who, because of car seat regulations, aren't ever born. The Economist, Melissa Carney, again.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  So this idea that well-meaning regulations that might have some benefit have unintended costs that could exceed the benefit is so fundamental to the way economists approach policy problems. And this is a great example of it because it shows a place where I think nobody would have really thought of this, right? And I mean, there are so many examples of this.

• 41:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance?

• 41:35Speaker 05

  A glaringly obvious one that economists debate all the time is if we raise the minimum wage, well, that looks really helpful, but are we actually going to hurt some of the people who are trying to benefit? Or here, I'll give you another one of my current... Favorite policy ideas to hate, which is this idea of free college. Okay. So most people would think, how could that possibly be bad? You're going to give free college to everyone. That's great. Well, from the data, we know that a lot of people who go to college don't complete. We know that the rates of completion are particularly low in non selective schools, in community colleges. You make those schools free and they have even fewer resources to devote.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  So seems an obvious unintended consequence is we're going to diminish the quality.

• 42:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Carney reserves her most intense policy wishes for young children.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  I always have. The plight of kids just, I guess, tugs at my heart and so pulled me in as a social scientist as well.

• 42:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you feel that kids are? I mean, this sounds surprising to say it, but I think it's your argument that kids are underrepresented in a lot of public policy discussions.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Oh, I feel very strongly that kids get short shrift in our current policy and political environment. If we cared about preventing child poverty as we do preventing elderly poverty, we could take care of that issue without that much money. You know, as compared to other things we spend in the federal budget.

• 43:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you say that we could take care of those problems, give me some hows and dollar signs attached to it.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  If we just gave every kid who lived in poverty in this country, the average social security benefit, that would essentially eradicate childhood poverty in this country for a price tag of around $180 billion. Now, $180 billion sounds like a lot of money.

• 43:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pre pandemic, it sounded like a lot.

• 43:39Speaker 05

  I mean, it's very small compared to what we spend on social security and disability insurance, or compared to what we spend on all sorts of write offs in the tax code for higher income people. So again, if this were a political priority. Then it wouldn't be hard for us to move money around in the federal budget, or even raise revenue to cover that kind of costs. And the point is just, we don't do more for kids in this country. We don't do more for poor kids in this country in particular, because they're not a political priority.

• 44:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when you say not a political priority, do you mean literally that they don't vote?

• 44:18Speaker 05

  I mean, literally, that very little in the federal budget goes toward ensuring children's well-being. This is cynical, but I suspect this is not unrelated to the fact that kids don't vote and there's no big lobbying group on behalf of disadvantaged kids.

• 44:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  It is strange, though, isn't it, considering that everyone who is not currently a kid has been a kid?

• 44:43Speaker 05

  It's stranger than that, because what's really strange is that, you know, it sounds so trite to say, but kids are quite literally the future of our country. And so, a failure to make sure all kids are meeting their human potential means that we will be a less strong society and economy and country going forward.

• 45:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's our show for this week. If you want to hear some of the earlier episodes we referred to, here's a list. The fracking boom, a baby boom, and the retreat from marriage is episode number 294. Does early education come way too late? Episode 288. Is America ready for a no-lose lottery? That's a two-parter, episode numbers 12 and 13. Also, there are a couple other earlier episodes that have to do with the birth rate and fertility. One was called Misadventures in Babymaking, episode number 46. And, we got right to the point with this one, Why Do People Keep Having Children? Episode number 186. You can find all these episodes and our entire archive at Freakonomics.com.

• 45:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I'm happy to say that very, very soon, you will be able to access our entire archive on any podcast app. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 46:02Speaker 09

  Fecal material, for example, is inherently disgusting.

• 46:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  We explore the nature of disgust.

• 46:09Speaker 09

  I've never eaten roadkill, but I would.

• 46:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  From an evolutionary standpoint, disgust has often served us well. But what if I told you that disgust is also holding us back? That it can prevent us from pursuing strategies that could improve the environment, the economy, even our health?

• 46:26Speaker 10

  Just try them. They're not as disgusting as they look.

• 46:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 46:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We can be reached at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Zach Lepinski. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Mark McCluskey, Greg Rippon, Daphne Chen, Mary Duke, and Matt Hickey. Our intern is Emma Terrell, and we had help this week from James Foster. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can get Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app. Our show can also be heard on many NPR stations around the country. As always, thank you for listening.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  In a fit of frustration-induced rage, I cut the straps off of the car seat base. It was the only way to get it out, but I didn't care. I was so done with it. I'm so ready to be out of this phase of life.