Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [70]
These researchers, many of whom actively care for injured children, are surely well-meaning. But are they right?
There are a variety of reasons why interviewing parents is not the ideal way to get reliable data. Parents may have been traumatized by the crash and will perhaps misremember details. There’s also the question of whether the parents—whose names the researchers harvested from an insurance company’s database—are being truthful. If your child was riding unrestrained in a car crash, you might feel strong social pressure (or, if you think the insurance company will raise your rates, financial pressure) to say your child was restrained. The police report will show whether or not the vehicle had a car seat, so you can’t readily lie about that. But every backseat has a seat belt, so even if your child wasn’t wearing one, you could say he was, and it would be difficult for anyone to prove otherwise.
Are there data sources other than parent interviews that could help us answer this important question about child injuries?
The FARS data set won’t work because it covers only fatal accidents. We did, however, locate three other data sets that contain information on all crashes. One was a nationally representative database and two were from individual states, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Together, they cover more than 9 million crashes. The Wisconsin data set was particularly useful because it linked each crash to hospital-discharge data, allowing us to better measure the extent of the injuries.
What does an analysis of these data reveal?
For preventing serious injury, lap-and-shoulder belts once again performed as well as child safety seats for children aged two through six. But for more minor injuries, car seats did a better job, reducing the likelihood of injury by roughly 25 percent compared with seat belts.
So don’t go throwing out your car seats just yet. (That would be illegal in all fifty states.) Children are such valuable cargo that even the relatively small benefit car seats seem to provide in preventing minor injuries may make them a worthwhile investment. There’s another benefit that’s hard to put a price tag on: a parent’s peace of mind.
Or, looking at it another way, maybe that’s the greatest cost of car seats. They give parents a misplaced sense of security, a belief they’ve done everything possible to protect their children. This complacency keeps us from striving for a better solution, one that may well be simpler and cheaper, and would save even more lives.
Imagine you were charged with starting from scratch to ensure the safety of all children who travel in cars. Do you really think the best solution is to begin with a device optimized for adults and use it to strap down some second, child-sized contraption? Would you really stipulate that this contraption be made by dozens of different manufacturers, and yet had to work in all vehicles even though each vehicle’s seat has its own design?
So here’s a radical thought: considering that half of all passengers who ride in the backseat of cars are children, what if seat belts were designed to fit them in the first place? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take a proven solution—one that happens to be cheap and simple—and adapt it, whether through adjustable belts or fold-down seat inserts (which do exist, though not widely)—rather than relying on a costly, cumbersome solution that doesn’t work very well?
But things seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Instead of pushing for a better solution to child auto safety, state governments across the United States have been raising the age when kids