Tea at Trianon: Morbid Safetyism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Morbid Safetyism

From First Things:

These thoughts were recalled to me this week by a new study put out by research faculty at MIT and Boston College respectively, Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon. Published on SSRN as a working paper, “Car Seats as Contraception” examines state and year variation in car seat laws. Since 1977, these laws have increasingly raised the age until which a young child must ride in a car seat (to as high as age 8 in some states). The authors note, as anyone with a third child can attest, that “these laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back.” They go on to pull state and year census data on household births, and find that women with two children below the car seat age in any given year are approximately three-quarters of a percentage point less likely to have a third child in that year than women with two children who are not constrained by the regulation (e.g., with at least one child above the car seat age). Since the probability of a woman with two kids giving birth to a third child in any given year is already very low (about 9 percent), a nearly one-point reduction in third births is significant.

For the year 2017, the authors estimate a permanent reduction of 8,000 births. Over their entire sample period, beginning in 1980, Nickerson and Solomon estimate about 145,000 prevented births, with 90 percent of the prevented births occurring since the year 2000 as car seat regulations became more aggressive. They point out that merely rolling back the car seat age (to age 4), rather than repealing the laws altogether, would have a significant positive impact on births, and they present simulations to this effect. (Read more.)