BuckeyeBlog

My post from a couple days ago on efforts to change Ohio’s booster seat laws has engendered some comments that I want to address. One, from “Tim” dismisses respected economist Steven Levitt by essentially saying his work is fiction. A more useful pair of comments come from “Lisa” which a few articles to refute Levitt’s work (which I recommended) that says booster seats for older kids aren’t all that useful.

Unfortunately, I can’t find an ungated version of the study recommended by “Lisa,” so I’m unable to evaluate its claims. I will freely admit that there are studies which support the idea that older kids need to use booster seats. There is evidence that these seats do very little, too. While some blithely dismiss the work of Steven Levitt, he’s a respected economist who actually looks at the data underlying these studies. And his partner, Stephen Dubner, posts here about other failings of car seats.

This really isn’t the place to get into a thorough analysis of the validity of car seat studies. It is the place to note that the evidence is far from overwhelming and, in my reading, pretty inconclusive. I’ll admit I could be wrong about the facts here, though. It doesn’t really matter if I am wrong, however. I’m not passing laws that affect the lives of every Ohioan. The place to have this full discussion and sort out who is wrong and who is right is in the General Assembly, specifically the Senate Highways & Transportation Committee, which is considering the legislation to tighten Ohio’s booster seat regulations. From the coverage I read, this type of discussion is not happening. Everyone, even those skeptical of this bill, seems to be operating under the assumption that these booster seats are effective for older kids. The General Assembly should probe this question a lot more thoroughly before it imposes any new mandates.

As reported by Gongwer($), Ohio is looking at strengthening its booster seat law to require older children to use these seats. Backers contend that “extensive empirical evidence” points to the need for more government regulation.

But does it?  For instance, Dr. William Cotton, medical director for the Primary Care Network and Nationwide Children’s Hospital contended that “recent research into 48,000 crashes involving some 56,000 children showed that youth in booster seats were 59% less likely to sustain an injury” (this is Gongwer’s summary of what he said, not a direct quote). However, as Stephen J. Dubner and Steven. D. Levitt, he authors of Freakonomics, point out, this data is based on comparing the use of a child in a booster seat to an unrestrained child, not a child who was using a seatbelt. Since the law already mandates children use seatbelts, this statistic is worthless in informing this debate.

Levitt and Dubner go on to point out:

In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes, there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain kinds of crashes — rear-enders, for instance — car seats actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be restrained in car seats, since that is what the government mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.

While it is understandable that Rep. Shannon Jones, the sponsor of this legislation, thinks the evidence points to the need to revise Ohio’s laws, it just isn’t so. While the popular conception is that booster seats save lives, this conception is based on a misreading of the data. Public policy needs to be based on solid facts. It does not seem this legislation is.

New schools built for security: Visitors must be buzzed in, under staff scrutiny

How nice. Rather than hold people accountable, let’s just require them to log in to a central processing center. I say we run it federally, because then we know it’ll be done right, and everyone will be safe, happy, healthy and wealthy.