No one, in my most humble opinion, has been writing better stuff than Michael Mandel recently. I would like to cover some of his writings on innovation, among our most important economic issues. First, I found his Nanny State post interesting. So, a little quiz he prepared.
So here’s a question for you: The accidental death rate for kids 5-14 today is about 5.4 deaths per 100,000. In 1965, the accidental death rate for this age group was:
a) about the same as today’s death rate.
b) 11, or double today’s death rate
c) 15, or triple today’s death rate.
d) 19, or more than triple today’s death rate.And let’s do a related question. The accidental death rate for kids 1-4 is 9.5 per 100,000. In 1965 the death rate for this age group was:
a) about the same as today’s death rate
b) 19, or about double today’s rate
c) 29, or about triple today’s rate
d) 33, or more than triple’s today’s rate
Got your answer? Ok, see below the fold.
The answer for both is d. Mandel believes that because we have increased our wealth, we can devote some of that to making changes which make our kids safer. Among those would be child safety caps, removing lead paint from toys and safety helmets for kids. Almost all of these have been done through government programs. While I have often been annoyed at having to pry off a safety cap or deal with pages of safety instructions, it appears to have made a huge difference in the welfare of our children.
So here’s the question. Was it worth it? Moms, Dads, was it worth the expenditure of money and time, the hassles with safety devices to reduce childhood deaths by that much? If repealing the Nanny State meant returning to those 1965 death rates, would it be worth it just to repeal the Nanny State?
Civilizations have the morality & ethics that they can afford.
One of these days I’m hoping to do a post entitled “The Founding Fathers’ Nanny State”. This country was never a libertarian paradise….
Given your usual level of research, I would love such a post.
Steve
Hint: a rather latitudinarian tendency in deciding what categories of “human capital” might be thought private property, much debated among the chatteling classes until the early 1860s.
I wonder how strong the correlation is and the causal relationship. (I only say this because of your occasional strict adherence to statistical rules.)
My parents began having seatbelts installed in our cars about 1962 or 1963 after we were in a minor accident. I wore a motorcycle helmet before there were helmet laws. I bought my son a snowboarding helmet this past fall, there is no law.
I imagine seatbelts in cars make up the bulk in the drop in accidental deaths which is largely the law. The use of bicycle helmets helps tremendously. Our overall safety consciousness has improved tremendously. We think of things that our parents didn’t seem to consider.
There’s a good chart here on accidental child deaths. Motor vehicles make up the largest number until recently when suffocation passed it. (!?) Automobile related safety regulations seem to be the have the greatest impact. But, the safety caps helped a great deal also.
Mandel conveniently fails to give the source of his info.
However, using this to argue against the Nanny State complaint is weak. Few people are against providing a safe environment for our kids. Those complaining against the Nanny state are complaining about laws aimed at adults who should have the right to make decisions for themselves. (Please don’t give me the lame, “When someone gets hurt we all pay for it in insurance rates, etc argument.”)
Anti-nanny staters (neologism?) are complaining about helmet laws, seat belt laws, smoking laws, proposed laws on trans fats and such aimed at adults. As I’ve shown above, I’ve made responsible decisions to minimize the risk of serious injury in many areas. But, risk can be good. Ask any mountain climber, white water paddler or anyone else who participates in a high risk activity. I prefer intelligent risk, i.e. risk tempered by good judgment.
DAD:However, using this to argue against the Nanny State complaint is weak.
Don’t mind Steve, DAD – he’s been suffering for some years now, apparently, from the most advanced case I’ve ever seen of RDS (Republican Derangement Syndrome) – the belief that, since both the fundamentalist types with whom he grew up and still works, as well as the Gingrich/Bush-era GOP in Washington, are cognitively challenged and inclined to support tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts, and a pre-emptive military policy, that therefore all things
associated in the public mind, if largely mistakenly and in rhetoric only, with the veteran post-Carter GOP coalition, liberty chief among them, are to be run from in shrieking horror, shunned by all civic-minded and well-disposed men striding manfully arm in arm toward the World of Tomorrow, lab charts in hand. And in that latter aspect, the technocrat dimension comes out in his apparent belief that there is no policy question that cannot be “settled” by an appeal, deceptively selective despite his touchingly Christmas Morning belief in himself as the World’s Most Scientific and Objective Policy Wonk, to statistics.
We are only emerging at fugitive points in our culture in fits and starts from such social-scientism, thanks to a re-awakened recognition of the sovereignty in human life not of science, but of ethics, intuition, and art, which will one day consign such reductionist, deceptively “value-free” white-coated tendencies in the higher wonkery-wankery to the same wing of the Graveyard of Dead Ideas as that “scientific socialism” by which a certain greybeard German swore up and down that unlike those communard dreamers who thought to found
their kibbutzim avant la Zion on the squishy sands of sentiment, his could be proved by iron laws of history of his own discovery deep within the bowels of the British Museum reading room. Word to your statistician mama: whenever you hear anyone claim to have “proven” his case for a given policy on the basis of science alone or even primarily, don’t run for the hills – stock up on pitchforks.
Dad-Scott is partially right, at least about the anti-Republican stuff, but I think you nailed it pretty well here.
“Those complaining against the Nanny state are complaining about laws aimed at adults who should have the right to make decisions for themselves. (Please don’t give me the lame, “When someone gets hurt we all pay for it in insurance rates, etc argument.”)
Anti-nanny staters (neologism?) are complaining about helmet laws, seat belt laws, smoking laws, proposed laws on trans fats and such aimed at adults. As I’ve shown above, I’ve made responsible decisions to minimize the risk of serious injury in many areas. But, risk can be good. Ask any mountain climber, white water paddler or anyone else who participates in a high risk activity. I prefer intelligent risk, i.e. risk tempered by good judgment.”
Now, some of those do affect others. There is pretty good evidence that second hand smoking is not especially good for you, and most non smokers do not like the smell. On motorcycle helmets, I dont care, as long as they pay higher insurance rates that correlate with the increased money we spend. Either that or let me decide if I feel like treating them when they come in. I am aware that there is conflicting evidence, so I would leave it up to the insurance companies. Same with seat belts, but the evidence for seatbelts is overwhelming.
I would do away with fines for not wearing seat belts. Instead, I would make it legal for insurance companies to sit down with their actuaries and decide if it costs them more to insure people who do not wear seat belts. Then, they could charge those people more. Insurance companies could be exempt from paying out if someone had an accident without a seat belt on. IMHO, this would be combining personal responsibility with liberty. I am not interested in taking away people’s liberty, but I do not like paying for other’s expressions of liberty when we know it will result in higher costs for all.
I suppose I am a little biased here. For most people this is just an academic blog discussion. Nearly every week I get to treat a trauma patient who did not have a seat belt on, turning what should have been minor injuries into major ones.
I am not sure where Mandel got his statistics. I email back and forth with some of the econ bloggers, surprising who will answer, and he seems to have a good reputation among the libertarian types, so I am taking his stats a bit on faith. I do know that child overdoses, which we saw pretty often in the past, have mostly gone with safety caps (for the very young).
So I would make your final sentence this. ” I prefer intelligent risk, i.e. risk tempered by good judgment and personal responsibility.”
Steve
And furthermore, DAD, whatever you do, DON’T DRINK SODA, especially not that rad new brand hot with all the cool dudes in the ER, “Dr. Steve (“♫Wouldn’t you like to be a Dr. ‘steve2′♫ “)” – each 16.9-oz, half-(Dear)Leader bottle you bring to the register requires you to present your current soda license, with proof of a sub-20 BMI (Body Mass Index) and healthy blood-sugar/lipid/triglyceride profiles, which exempt you from the fat-fighting tax for the current ‘physical year’ as defined by the OMB, the CBO and the Surgeon General; failure to present such to the tongue-pierced clerk at the minimart subjects you to a 10,000 percent surcharge weighted unto your current premiums/pre-existing conditions, subject to pro-rated interest-bearing rebates to your heirs and assigns in the event you die never having burdened the nation’s surgical wards with the subcutaneous monstrosity of your fat soda-sodden glutes.
We recall with charmed nostalgia the old theatrical cartoons featuring the blind little bald-headed soda-tax advocate Mr. Pigou, bumping heedlessly into one set-piece victim after another, from Chinaman to beatnik (it was the 1950s after all) to haplessly slurping teenaged Mountain Dewed at imminent risk for Type II diabetes thus threatening with his lone and his nation’s last soda-slurping straw to break the camel’s back of its overburdened medical-insurance racket, but for our good Dr.’s manning the burning deck of new taxation whence all but he, with no thought whatever for his own personal safety or enhanced guild power over his countrymen, had fled…
The newer safety requirements for putting the kids (and short adults) in the back seat really do cause problems.
1) It is just plain counterintuitive to imagine that there is any place safer for a small child than the arms of its parent. The best way to get the point across in a really palpable way is to put the teenage license applicant in the shotgun seat holding a 10-pound sack of potatoes, and then have the driver stop short. This should be a required element of any driver ed course.
2) Children’s car seats are expensive, and some brands don’t work properly.
3) Some cars (and trucks) don’t have back seats.
4) Some families are too large to fit in regular cars as opposed to vans. And vans are expensive.
Given that the whole issue arose, not because of things that normally happen to front-seat passengers in car crashes, but because of things that happen to front-seat passengers in close proximity to airbags, and that airbags were mandated because some people weren’t using seatbelts, this needs to be re-thought.
Also, re: mountaineering, whitewater rafting etc., the “expense to the general public” argument is already in use. People who get themselves lost or marooned on mountains and in other dangerous and remote places are often required to repay the costs of rescuing them, afterwards.
I’m all for government regulation which offers some semblance of assurance that food and other products which come to us via thousands of miles long supply chains through a series of near-monopolies might be safe. Child safety caps are fine too.
I also am glad to have protection from second-hand smoke, especially when I’m trying to eat a meal, because it really does drift into my face. However, enough is enough — our smoking fellow citizens should have SOMEWHERE they can smoke indoors in the winter. They shouldn’t have to walk across the street on their break out in the cold.
As for children, I found the government campaign to promote, and then require, “booster seats” for children under four feet to be absurd — and probably motivated by the existence of an industry eager for a market to supply them. The TV promotion was classic “we know what’s best for you – the experts have already decided – don’t ask us for factual details.” I also resent laws which restrict parents’ willingness to let children run around the neighhorhood and play, because someone might fall down and skin their knee and have to walk twenty yards home crying to get antiseptic and a band-aid, and the family might lose custody if a social worker hears about it. No wonder so many kids are obese!
When I see statistical correlation, I always want to know the mechanism which explains why one statistic is related to the other. I recently read that the increase in global warming correlates with a decrease in the number of pirates in the Caribbean. Incidentally, I find the evidence that human activity releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere DOES have a net warming effect quite credible. But I doubt that correlation to the number of pirates points to significant causation.
This one’s for you Scott. The Soda Police are gathering power. Pretty soon it will be easier to buy coke than Coke.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224142046.htm
Steve
I am shocked indeed to discover meddlesome busybody “value-free” scientists, a proud term elsewhere that I use here with unconscionable latitude, outside Alexandrian precincts. If you can read the phrase below, bolding added, from the article without sore abs, you’d survive a childhood’s worth of church services far more smoothly than I managed to:
the massive weight loss the nation now requires
Anyone wants to know why I’m no longer happy living in this godforsaken country, and can’t wait to leave it, probably, as things now appear, by means far quicker and more decisive than either emigration or massive weight gain, the regnant we-”scientists”-know-what’s-best-for-you-peons frame of (lost) “mind” displayed in that article as throughout the length and breadth of Alexandria is as good an obscenity-free clue as I’m presently willing to voice in a family blog.
I don’t know. I don’t understand the urge to fight to defend one’s right to engage in foolish behavior. And we’re not talking about mountain climbing or white water rafting. There’s nothing thrilling about not wearing a seat belt.
A lot of this is about changing behavior. How many of us wear a seat belt religiously now, in part because the norms changed ? Having laws changed norms which changed behavior.
I remember my behavior changed with bicycle helmets. I hated them at first — they seemed queer and sissy. But I wasn’t proud of my resistance — I wouldn’t fight for my right to make bad decisions. I was happy when norms changed and I felt some pressure to change. Now I don’t think twice before putting my helmet on.
Having laws in place caused many of us to make better decisions. For those who cherish their right to make bad decisions, I am afraid I don’t view your right to drive without a seat belt or bike without a helmet as worth those lives thay were saved by changing behavior, not to mention the innocent people who were saved.
The fight is not for anyone’s right to engage in foolish behavior, it is the right to determine for ourselves what is in fact “foolish,” and to personally accept the consequences if we judge wrongly. Experts can be wrong, and if their error has the force of law, we all pay the price for it.
I do not wear a bicycle helmet. There were no such things when I grew up. I also don’t race at high speeds. Now if I were attempting to ride a two-wheeled bicycle with a two year old on the back, I would strap the two year old in with a cage around them and interior padding, because I would be unable to grasp them, stop the bike, and catch my own fall all at once.
I’m ambivalent about seat belt laws, as long as people are aware that they could find their insurance coverage sharply reduced for medical injuries incurred while not wearing one, but I find them tolerable.
As I’ve written elsewhere, we have a bad hybrid in our politics, because John Dewey’s pragmatists grafted themselves onto what passed for “progressive” politics, giving liberation a bad name by deferring to experts, and letting conservatives pose as defenders of “liberty.” I don’t want experts telling my legislators what is good for me, and then legislators making it law. I want to tell my legislator what is good for me, and then, if enough people in the district agree, s/he can vote to make it a law. The experts can make their case to the voters, not directly to the legislators over the voters heads. Executive branch agencies can stick to carrying out laws passed by the legislature, not telling the legislature what would be good for the people.