Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [68]
Nor is the car-seat solution as simple as most people might like. Any given seat is a tangle of straps, tethers, and harnesses, built by one of dozens of manufacturers, and it must be anchored in place by a car’s existing seat belt—whose configuration varies depending on its manufacturer, as does the shape and contour of the rear seat itself. Furthermore, those seat belts were designed to batten down a large human being, not a small, inanimate hunk of plastic. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), more than 80 percent of car seats are improperly installed. That’s why so many parents trek to the local police station or firehouse for help with the seats. And that’s why NHTSA runs a four-day National Standardized Child Passenger Safety Training Program for public-safety personnel, using a 345-page manual to teach proper installation.
But who cares if car seats aren’t so simple or cheap? Not every solution can be as elegant as we might like. Isn’t it worth a police officer sacrificing four days of work to master such a valuable safety device? What matters is that car seats are effective, that they save children’s lives. And according to NHTSA, they do, reducing the risk of fatality by a whopping 54 percent for children ages one to four.
Curious parents may have a question: a 54 percent reduction compared with what?
That answer can easily be found on NHTSA’s own website. The agency maintains a trove of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a compilation of police reports from all fatal crashes in the United States since 1975. It records every imaginable variable—the type and number of vehicles involved, their speed, time of day, where the passengers were sitting in the car—including what kind of safety restraints, if any, were being worn.
It turns out that a child in a car seat is 54 percent less likely to die than a child riding completely unrestrained—that is, with no car seat, no seat belt, no nothing. That makes sense. A car crash is a violent affair, and a lot of terrible things can happen to a mass of flesh and bone when it is traveling fast inside a heavy metal object that suddenly stops moving.
But how much better is the complicated and costly new solution (the car seat) than the cheap and simple old solution (the seat belt), even though the simple solution wasn’t meant for kids?
Seat belts plainly won’t do for children under two years old. They are simply too small, and a car seat is the best practical way to secure them. But what about older children? Laws vary by state, but in many cases car seats are mandatory until a child is six or seven years old. How much do those kids benefit from car seats?
A quick look at the raw FARS data from nearly thirty years of crashes reveals a surprising result. For children two and older, the rate of death in crashes involving at least one fatality is almost identical for those riding in car seats and those wearing seat belts:
It may be that these raw data are misleading. Perhaps kids who ride in car seats are in more violent crashes. Or maybe their parents drive more at night, or on more dangerous roads, or in less-safe vehicles?
But even the most rigorous econometric analysis of the FARS data yields the same results. In recent crashes and old ones, in vehicles large and small, in single-car crashes and pileups, there is no evidence that car seats are better than seat belts in saving the lives of children two and older. In certain kinds of crashes—rear-enders, for instance—car seats actually perform slightly worse.
So maybe the problem is, as NHTSA admits, that too many car seats are installed improperly. (You might argue that a forty-year-old safety device that only 20 percent of its users can install correctly may not be a great safety device to begin with; compared with car seats, the condoms worn by Indian men seem