Economics behind safety

In some ways US is one of the most safety-conscious nations. I am now getting used to it but when I was new in this country and on a holiday people said to me "Have a safe holiday" as opposed to a "happy holiday" or a "fun holiday", I used to find it very strange. I have always felt that the safety thing is often overdone, and it has purely been driven by companies not wanting to get sued.

Thus it was with much interest and sense of "A-Ha" that I recently read a chapter of the book Freakonomics. The author states that most of the safety issues become a lot more prominent, and you find all kinds of seemingly non-commercial promotion of those issues, as soon as there is a product to sell that keeps us or our kids "safer." For example, only a nominal number of lives are saved by car seats. Kids are definitely more safer in the backseat, as opposed to riding in the front seat on somebody's lap but beyond that car seats don't save that many lives. On the other hand, a lot more kids die by drowning in home swimming pools. Now there is no safety product to save kids from drowning - what you need is a watchful adult. So you see states rushing to pass laws to require car seats and booster seats, but the issue of water safety hasn't gained any traction over the years. Just wait until a company has some kind of device to sell that can prevent kids from drowning, and all of a sudden it will become a big issue and legislators will be passing laws to require its use.

I am one of the parents who insists my kids use a booster seat in the car, now that they have outgrown their car seats. The usage of car seat has been so instilled in our heads by the "experts" and studies, of them, I am sure, financed by the car seat companies, that going without a car seat seems very very wrong. My 7 year old has been resisting her booster of late because she sees her classmates riding without them, in the front seat no less, and here she is being required to sit in a booster. After this article I have been thinking that maybe I can let her go without a booster. I don't think she is getting to ride in the front seat anytime soon, though, because as it happens having kids in the backseat does keep them safer.