WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Once upon a time, there was a dread disease that afflicted children. 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:09.000 And in fact, among all the diseases that existed in this land, 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:12.000 it was the worst. It killed the most children. 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.000 And along came a brilliant inventor, a scientist, 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:18.000 who came up with a partial cure for that disease. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:22.000 And it wasn't perfect. Many children still died, 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.000 but it was certainly better than what they had before. 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:31.000 And one of the good things about this cure was that it was free, 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:33.000 virtually free, and was very easy to use. 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:36.000 But the worst thing about it was that you couldn't use it 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:40.000 on the youngest children, on infants, and on one-year-olds. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:42.000 And so, as a consequence, a few years later, 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:44.000 another scientist -- perhaps maybe this scientist 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:48.000 not quite as brilliant as the one who had preceded him, 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:50.000 but building on the invention of the first one -- 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:53.000 came up with a second cure. 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:56.000 And the beauty of the second cure for this disease 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:00.000 was that it could be used on infants and one-year-olds. 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:05.000 And the problem with this cure was it was very expensive, 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:06.000 and it was very complicated to use. 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:10.000 And although parents tried as hard as they could to use it properly, 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:14.000 almost all of them ended up using it wrong in the end. 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:17.000 But what they did, of course, since it was so complicated and expensive, 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 they only used it on the zero-year-olds and the one-year-olds. 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.000 And they kept on using the existing cure that they had 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:24.000 on the two-year-olds and up. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:26.000 And this went on for quite some time. People were happy. 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:29.000 They had their two cures. Until a particular mother, 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:34.000 whose child had just turned two, died of this disease. 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:38.000 And she thought to herself, "My child just turned two, 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:42.000 and until the child turned two, I had always used 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:47.000 this complicated, expensive cure, you know, this treatment. 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:48.000 And then the child turned two, and I started using 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:51.000 the cheap and easy treatment, and I wonder" -- 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:53.000 and she wondered, like all parents who lose children wonder -- 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:55.000 "if there isn't something that I could have done, 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:59.000 like keep on using that complicated, expensive cure." 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:02.000 And she told all the other people, and she said, 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:04.000 "How could it possibly be that something 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:07.000 that's cheap and simple works as well as something 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:09.000 that's complicated and expensive?" 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:11.000 And the people thought, "You know, you're right. 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:13.000 It probably is the wrong thing to do to switch 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:16.000 and use the cheap and simple solution." 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:19.000 And the government, they heard her story and the other people, 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:22.000 and they said, "Yeah, you're right, we should make a law. 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:24.000 We should outlaw this cheap and simple treatment 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:27.000 and not let anybody use this on their children." 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.000 And the people were happy. They were satisfied. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:32.000 For many years this went along, and everything was fine. 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:37.000 But then along came a lowly economist, who had children himself, 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:44.000 and he used the expensive and complicated treatment. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:46.000 But he knew about the cheap and simple one. 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:48.000 And he thought about it, and the expensive one 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:51.000 didn't seem that great to him. So he thought, 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:54.000 "I don't know anything about science, but I do know something about data, 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:56.000 so maybe I should go and look at the data 00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:00.000 and see whether this expensive and complicated treatment 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:03.000 actually works any better than the cheap and simple one." 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:05.000 And lo and behold, when he went through the data, 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:08.000 he found that it didn't look like the expensive, complicated 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.000 solution was any better than the cheap one, 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.000 at least for the children who were two and older -- 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 the cheap one still didn't work on the kids who were younger. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:20.000 And so, he went forth to the people and he said, 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:22.000 "I've made this wonderful finding: 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:25.000 it looks as if we could just use the cheap and simple solution, 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.000 and by doing so we could save ourselves 300 million dollars a year, 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:30.000 and we could spend that on our children in other ways." 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:34.000 And the parents were very unhappy, and they said, 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:36.000 "This is a terrible thing, because how can the cheap and easy thing 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:40.000 be as good as the hard thing?" And the government was very upset. 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:43.000 And in particular, the people who made this expensive solution 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:45.000 were very upset because they thought, 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:48.000 "How can we hope to compete with something that's essentially free? 00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:50.000 We would lose all of our market." 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:53.000 And people were very angry, and they called him horrible names. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:56.000 And he decided that maybe he should leave the country 00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:00.000 for a few days, and seek out some more intelligent, 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:03.000 open-minded people in a place called Oxford, 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:06.000 and come and try and tell the story at that place. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:06.000 --> 00:04:10.000 And so, anyway, here I am. It's not a fairy tale. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:12.000 It's a true story about the United States today, 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:15.000 and the disease I'm referring to is actually 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:18.000 motor vehicle accidents for children. 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:24.000 And the free cure is adult seatbelts, and the expensive cure -- 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:28.000 the 300-million-dollar-a-year cure -- is child car seats. 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.000 And what I'd like to talk to you about today 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:33.000 is some of the evidence why I believe this to be true: 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:35.000 that for children two years old and up, 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:40.000 there really is no real benefit -- proven benefit -- of car seats, 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:45.000 in spite of the incredible energy 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:48.000 that has been devoted toward expanding the laws 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:50.000 and making it socially unacceptable 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:55.000 to put your children into seatbelts. And then talk about why -- 00:04:55.000 --> 00:04:56.000 what is it that makes that true? 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:59.000 And then, finally talk a little bit about a third way, 00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:02.000 about another technology, which is probably better than anything we have, 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:05.000 but which -- there hasn't been any enthusiasm for adoption 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:07.000 precisely because people are so enamored 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:10.000 with the current car seat solution. OK. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:13.000 So, many times when you try to do research on data, 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:17.000 it records complicated stories -- it's hard to find in the data. 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:20.000 It doesn't turn out to be the case when you look at seatbelts versus car seats. 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:22.000 So the United States keeps a data set 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:25.000 of every fatal accident that's happened since 1975. 00:05:25.000 --> 00:05:28.000 So in every car crash in which at least one person dies, 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:30.000 they have information on all of the people. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:33.000 So if you look at that data -- it's right up on the National Highway 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.000 Transportation Safety Administration's website -- 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:37.000 you can just look at the raw data, 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:41.000 and begin to get a sense of the limited amount of evidence 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:44.000 that's in favor of car seats for children aged two and up. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:48.000 So, here is the data. Here I have, among two- to six-year-olds -- 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:50.000 anyone above six, basically no one uses car seats, 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:56.000 so you can't compare -- 29.3 percent of the children who are unrestrained 00:05:56.000 --> 00:06:00.000 in a crash in which at least one person dies, themselves die. 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:05.000 If you put a child in a car seat, 18.2 percent of the children die. 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:07.000 If they're wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt, in this raw data, 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:12.000 19.4 percent die. And interestingly, wearing a lap-only seatbelt, 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:14.000 16.7 percent die. And actually, the theory tells you 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:17.000 that the lap-only seatbelt's got to be worse 00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:18.000 than the lap-and-shoulder belt. And that just reminds you 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:20.000 that when you deal with raw data, there are hundreds 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:23.000 of confounding variables that may be getting in the way. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:28.000 So what we do in the study is -- and this is just presenting 00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:31.000 the same information, but turned into a figure to make it easier. 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:34.000 So the yellow bar represents car seats, 00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:38.000 the orange bar lap-and-shoulder, and the red bar lap-only seatbelts. 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:40.000 And this is all relative to unrestrained -- 00:06:40.000 --> 00:06:41.000 the bigger the bar, the better. Okay. 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:43.000 So, this is the data I just showed, OK? 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:46.000 So the highest bar is what you're striving to beat. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:50.000 So you can control for the basic things, like how hard the crash was, 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:54.000 what seat the child was sitting in, etc., the age of the child. 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:56.000 And that's that middle set of bars. 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:59.000 And so, you can see that the lap-only seatbelts 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:01.000 start to look worse once you do that. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:03.000 And then finally, the last set of bars, 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:06.000 which are really controlling for everything 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:08.000 you could possibly imagine about the crash, 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:11.000 50, 75, 100 different characteristics of the crash. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:14.000 And what you find is that the car seats and the lap-and-shoulder belts, 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:18.000 when it comes to saving lives, fatalities look exactly identical. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:22.000 And the standard error bands are relatively small around these estimates as well. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:25.000 And it's not just overall. It's very robust 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:27.000 to anything you want to look at. 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:30.000 One thing that's interesting: if you look at frontal-impact crashes -- 00:07:30.000 --> 00:07:33.000 when the car crashes, the front hits into something -- 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:37.000 indeed, what you see is that the car seats look a little bit better. 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:39.000 And I think this isn't just chance. 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:40.000 In order to have the car seat approved, 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:43.000 you need to pass certain federal standards, 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:48.000 all of which involve slamming your car into a direct frontal crash. 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:50.000 But when you look at other types of crashes, like rear-impact crashes, 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:53.000 indeed, the car seats don't perform as well. 00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000 And I think that's because they've been optimized to pass, 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:57.000 as we always expect people to do, 00:07:57.000 --> 00:07:59.000 to optimize relative to bright-line rules 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:03.000 about how affected the car will be. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:03.000 --> 00:08:04.000 And the other thing you might argue is, 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:06.000 "Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:09.000 And so if we look at recent crashes -- 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:11.000 the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data -- 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:13.000 you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better." 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:17.000 But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:20.000 actually, are doing even better than the car seats. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:23.000 They say, "Well, that's impossible, that can't be." 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:25.000 And the line of argument, if you ask parents, is, 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:28.000 "But car seats are so expensive and complicated, 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:31.000 and they have this big tangle of latches, 00:08:31.000 --> 00:08:34.000 how could they possibly not work better than seatbelts 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:36.000 because they are so expensive and complicated?" 00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:39.000 It's kind of an interesting logic, 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:42.000 I think, that people use. And the other logic, they say, 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:44.000 "Well, the government wouldn't have told us [to] use them 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:46.000 if they weren't much better." NOTE Paragraph 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:48.000 But what's interesting is the government telling us to use them 00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:50.000 is not actually based on very much. 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:53.000 It really is based on some impassioned pleas of parents 00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:56.000 whose children died after they turned two, 00:08:56.000 --> 00:09:00.000 which has led to the passage of all these laws -- not very much on data. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:04.000 So you can only get so far, I think, in telling your story 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:06.000 by using these abstract statistics. 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:11.000 And so I had some friends over to dinner, and I was asking -- 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:14.000 we had a cookout -- I was asking them what advice they might have for me 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:18.000 about proving my point. They said, "Why don't you run some crash tests?" 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:20.000 And I said, "That's a great idea." 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:22.000 So we actually tried to commission some crash tests. 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:27.000 And it turns out that as we called around to the independent 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:30.000 crash test companies around the country, 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:32.000 none of them wanted to do our crash test 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:36.000 because they said, some explicitly, some not so explicitly, 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:38.000 "All of our business comes from car seat manufacturers. 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:42.000 We can't risk alienating them by testing seatbelts relative to car seats." NOTE Paragraph 00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:46.000 Now, eventually, one did. Under the conditions of anonymity, 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:49.000 they said they would be happy to do this test for us -- 00:09:49.000 --> 00:09:54.000 so anonymity, and 1,500 dollars per seat that we crashed. 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:56.000 And so, we went to Buffalo, New York, 00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:58.000 and here is the precursor to it. 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.000 These are the crash test dummies, 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:03.000 waiting for their chance to take the center stage. 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:05.000 And then, here's how the crash test works. 00:10:05.000 --> 00:10:08.000 Here, they don't actually crash the entire car, you know -- 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:11.000 it's not worth ruining a whole car to do it. 00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:12.000 So they just have these bench seats, 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:14.000 and they strap the car seat and the seatbelt onto it. 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.000 So I just wanted you to look at this. 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:18.000 And I think this gives you a good idea of why parents think 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:20.000 car seats are so great. Look at the kid in the car seat. 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:23.000 Does he not look content, ready to go, 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:25.000 like he could survive anything? And then, if you look at the kid in back, 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:28.000 it looks like he's already choking before the crash even happens. 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:31.000 It's hard to believe, when you look at this, that 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:33.000 that kid in back is going to do very well when you get in a crash. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:35.000 So this is going to be a crash 00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:38.000 where they're going to slam this thing forward into a wall 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:41.000 at 30 miles an hour, and see what happens. OK? NOTE Paragraph 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:43.000 So, let me show you what happens. 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:46.000 These are three-year-old dummies, by the way. 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:48.000 So here -- this is the car seat. Now watch two things: 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:50.000 watch how the head goes forward, 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:52.000 and basically hits the knees -- and this is in the car seat -- 00:10:52.000 --> 00:10:57.000 and watch how the car seat flies around, in the rebound, up in the air. 00:10:57.000 --> 00:10:59.000 The car seat's moving all over the place. 00:10:59.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Bear in mind there are two things about this. 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:04.000 This is a car seat that was installed by someone 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:07.000 who has installed 1,000 car seats, who knew exactly how to do it. 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:08.000 And also it turned out these bench seats 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:11.000 are the very best way to install car seats. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:14.000 Having a flat back makes it much easier to install them. 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:17.000 And so this is a test that's very much rigged in favor of the car seat, 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:20.000 OK? So, that kid in this crash fared very well. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:22.000 The federal standards are 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:24.000 that you have to score below a 1,000 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:26.000 to be an approved car seat on this crash, 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:30.000 in some metric of units which are not important. 00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:33.000 And this crash would have been about a 450. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000 So this car seat was actually an above-average car seat 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:37.000 from Consumer Reports, and did quite well. 00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:40.000 So the next one. Now, this is the kid, same crash, 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:45.000 who is in the seatbelt. He hardly moves at all, actually, 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:48.000 relative to the other child. The funny thing is, 00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:51.000 the cam work is terrible because they've only set it up 00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:53.000 to do the car seats, and so, they actually don't even have a way 00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:55.000 to move the camera so you can see the kid that's on the rebound. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:11:59.000 Anyway, it turns out that those two crashes, that actually 00:11:59.000 --> 00:12:03.000 the three-year-old did slightly worse. So, he gets about a 500 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:07.000 out of -- you know, on this range -- relative to a 400 and something. 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:10.000 But still, if you just took that data from that crash 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:13.000 to the federal government, and said, "I have invented a new car seat. 00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:16.000 I would like you to approve it for selling," 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:19.000 then they would say, "This is a fantastic new car seat, it works great. 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:21.000 It only got a 500, it could have gotten as high up as a 1,000." 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:24.000 And this seatbelt would have passed with flying colors 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000 into being approved as a car seat. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:28.000 So, in some sense, what this is suggesting 00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:31.000 is that it's not just that people are setting up their car seats wrong, 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:33.000 which is putting children at risk. It's just that, fundamentally, 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.000 the car seats aren't doing much. 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:37.000 So here's the crash. So these are timed at the same time, 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:39.000 so you can see that it takes much longer with the car seat -- 00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:41.000 at rebound, it takes a lot longer -- 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:45.000 but there's just a lot less movement for child who's in the seatbelt. 00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:47.000 So, I'll show you the six-year-old crashes as well. 00:12:47.000 --> 00:12:52.000 The six-year-old is in a car seat, and it turns out 00:12:52.000 --> 00:12:57.000 that looks terrible, but that's great. That's like a 400, OK? 00:12:57.000 --> 00:12:58.000 So that kid would do fine in the crash. 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:02.000 Nothing about that would have been problematic to the child at all. 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:05.000 And then here's the six-year-old in the seatbelt, 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:07.000 and in fact, they get exactly within, you know, 00:13:07.000 --> 00:13:11.000 within one or two points of the same. So really, for the six-year-old, 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:15.000 the car seat did absolutely nothing whatsoever. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:18.000 That's some more evidence, so in some sense -- 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:22.000 I was criticized by a scientist, who said, "You could never publish 00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:24.000 a study with an n of 4," meaning those four crashes. 00:13:24.000 --> 00:13:28.000 So I wrote him back and I said, "What about an n of 45,004?" 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:30.000 Because I had the other 45,000 other real-world crashes. 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:34.000 And I just think that it's interesting that the idea 00:13:34.000 --> 00:13:36.000 of using real-world crashes, which is very much something 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:38.000 that economists think would be the right thing to do, 00:13:38.000 --> 00:13:40.000 is something that scientists don't actually, usually think -- 00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:43.000 they would rather use a laboratory, 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:45.000 a very imperfect science of looking at the dummies, 00:13:45.000 --> 00:13:49.000 than actually 30 years of data of what we've seen 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:52.000 with children and with car seats. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:52.000 --> 00:13:56.000 And so I think the answer to this puzzle 00:13:56.000 --> 00:13:59.000 is that there's a much better solution out there, 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:02.000 that's gotten nobody excited because everyone 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.000 is so delighted with the way car seats are presumably working. 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:09.000 And if you think from a design perspective, 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:11.000 about going back to square one, and say, 00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:13.000 "I just want to protect kids in the back seat." 00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:15.000 I don't there's anyone in this room who'd say, 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:16.000 "Well, the right way to start would be, 00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:19.000 let's make a great seat belt for adults. 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:21.000 And then, let's make this really big contraption 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:24.000 that you have to rig up to it in this daisy chain." 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:27.000 I mean, why not start -- who's sitting in the back seat anyway except for kids? 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:30.000 But essentially, do something like this, 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:32.000 which I don't know exactly how much it would cost to do, 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:33.000 but there's no reason I could see 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:35.000 why this should be much more expensive than a regular car seat. 00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:39.000 It's just actually -- you see, this is folding up -- it's behind the seat. 00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:41.000 You've got a regular seat for adults, and then you fold it down, 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:43.000 and the kid sits on top, and it's integrated. 00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:47.000 It seems to me that this can't be a very expensive solution, 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:50.000 and it's got to work better than what we already have. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:50.000 --> 00:14:55.000 So the question is, is there any hope for adoption of something like this, 00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:57.000 which would presumably save a lot of lives? 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:01.000 And I think the answer, perhaps, lies in a story. 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:05.000 The answer both to why has a car seat been so successful, 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:08.000 and why this may someday be adopted or not, 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:12.000 lies in a story that my dad told me, relating to when he was a doctor 00:15:12.000 --> 00:15:15.000 in the U.S. Air Force in England. And this is a long time ago: 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:17.000 you were allowed to do things then you can't do today. 00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:21.000 So, my father would have patients come in 00:15:21.000 --> 00:15:24.000 who he thought were not really sick. 00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:28.000 And he had a big jar full of placebo pills that he would give them, 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:31.000 and he'd say, "Come back in a week, if you still feel lousy." 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:32.000 OK, and most of them would not come back, 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:34.000 but some of them would come back. 00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:38.000 And when they came back, he, still convinced they were not sick, 00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:43.000 had another jar of pills. In this jar were huge horse pills. 00:15:43.000 --> 00:15:45.000 They were almost impossible to swallow. 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:49.000 And these, to me, are the analogy for the car seats. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:53.000 People would look at these and say, "Man, this thing is so big 00:15:53.000 --> 00:15:55.000 and so hard to swallow. If this doesn't make me feel better, 00:15:55.000 --> 00:15:58.000 you know, what possibly could?" NOTE Paragraph 00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:00.000 And it turned out that most people wouldn't come back, 00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:03.000 because it worked. But every once in a while, 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:08.000 there was still a patient convinced that he was sick, 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:11.000 and he'd come back. And my dad had a third jar of pills. 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:13.000 And the jar of pills he had, he said, 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:16.000 were the tiniest little pills he could find, 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:18.000 so small you could barely see them. 00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:20.000 And he would say, listen, I know I gave you that huge pill, 00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:24.000 that complicated, hard-to-swallow pill before, 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:26.000 but now I've got one that's so potent, 00:16:26.000 --> 00:16:28.000 that is really tiny and small and almost invisible. 00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:31.000 It's almost like this thing here, which you can't even see." NOTE Paragraph 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:33.000 And it turned out that never, 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:36.000 in all the times my dad gave out this pill, the really tiny pill, 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:39.000 did anyone ever come back still complaining of sickness. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:42.000 So, my dad always took that as evidence 00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:46.000 that this little, teeny, powerful pill 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:50.000 had the ultimate placebo effect. And in some sense, if that's the right story, 00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:52.000 I think integrated car seats you will see, very quickly, 00:16:52.000 --> 00:16:56.000 becoming something that everyone has. The other possible conclusion 00:16:56.000 --> 00:16:59.000 is, well, maybe after coming to my father three times, 00:16:59.000 --> 00:17:01.000 getting sent home with placebos, he still felt sick, 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:03.000 he went and found another doctor. 00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:05.000 And that's completely possible. And if that's the case, 00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:08.000 then I think we're stuck with conventional car seats for a long time to come. 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:09.000 Thank you very much. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:13.000 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:15.000 (Audience: I just wanted to ask you, when we wear seatbelts 00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:18.000 we don't necessarily wear them just to prevent loss of life, 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:20.000 it's also to prevent lots of serious injury. 00:17:20.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Your data looks at fatalities. It doesn't look at serious injury. 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:26.000 Is there any data to show that child seats 00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:29.000 are actually less effective, or just as effective as seatbelts 00:17:29.000 --> 00:17:31.000 for serious injury? Because that would prove your case.) NOTE Paragraph 00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:34.000 Steven Levitt: Yeah, that's a great question. In my data, and in another data set 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:37.000 I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, 00:17:37.000 --> 00:17:41.000 I find very small differences in injury. 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:43.000 So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences 00:17:43.000 --> 00:17:47.000 in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:48.000 In the New Jersey data, which is different, 00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:51.000 because it's not just fatal crashes, 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:53.000 but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, 00:17:53.000 --> 00:17:56.000 it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, 00:17:56.000 --> 00:17:58.000 but generally they're the minor injuries. 00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:00.000 Now, what's interesting, I should say this as a disclaimer, 00:18:00.000 --> 00:18:05.000 there is medical literature that is very difficult to resolve with this other data, 00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:09.000 which suggests that car seats are dramatically better. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:11.000 And they use a completely different methodology that involves -- 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:14.000 after the crash occurs, they get from the insurance companies 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:16.000 the names of the people who were in the crash, 00:18:16.000 --> 00:18:17.000 and they call them on the phone, 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:18.000 and they asked them what happened. 00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:21.000 And I really can't resolve, yet, 00:18:21.000 --> 00:18:23.000 and I'd like to work with these medical researchers 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:26.000 to try to understand how there can be these differences, 00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:29.000 which are completely at odds with one another. 00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:32.000 But it's obviously a critical question. 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.000 The question is even if -- are there enough serious injuries 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:38.000 to make these cost-effective? It's kind of tricky. 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:40.000 Even if they're right, it's not so clear 00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:41.000 that they're so cost-effective.