Car Seat Anxiety

The car seat industry thrives on parental fear, and I believe much of that fear is misplaced and deliberately manufactured. With a better treatment of risk, I think we could help parents worry less, and have more children. Background There’s a really famous paper (Car Seats as Contraception) in this space which basically shows that the creep of car seat legislation has led to a reduction in the probability of having a third child in America, just because the average American car can’t fit 3 car seats in the back. So people postpone, or in some cases, don’t have a third child because it’d require a new car. If you look at the number of children’s lives that the legislation have saved (57) and compare that to the number of children who weren’t born because of the impact of car seat legislation (~8,000), you end up with a big big child-shaped gap. Net, car seat legislation is costing us children’s lives. Of course, if you’re an actualist and think that only existing people count morally,…