Calculating the cost of safety

Back in the spring, when the coronavirus was first bearing down on Canada, I wrote a column about what a culture of safety looks like when encountering a pandemic. After a few decades of “safety first” on everything from construction sites to seat belts and bike helmets, there was no question that everything else would give way when safety was our top social priority — and everything else did.

There has been a remarkable consensus on the various pandemic restrictions. When a barbecue joint in

Toronto defied the most recent lockdown, it occasioned thunderous maledictions and a massive police presence, mainly because there were no other miscreants to divide the public’s attention.

The ratcheting up of safety culture is partly a function of prosperity. Everyone wants to be safe, and if you can afford the cost of safety, why not pay it?

Yet figuring out that cost is tricky. Static analysis is conceptually easy — the extra railing costs this much, snow tires cost that much, the extra insurance rider is an additional $ 100. It’s painstaking, but with enough effort it can be done. We can measure how many fewer people die in car accidents in terms of kilometres driven, and the insurance industry can tell us how many of the safer, crash-absorbing cars they write off. Manufacturers know the marginal cost of the safety features. So the cost of safer cars can be (laboriously) estimated.

Dynamic analysis is fiendishly complicated, however. How many fewer decks are built because of more stringent safety requirements? How many fewer summer painting jobs are available because regulations require safety equipment most students cannot afford?

Intangibles make it more difficult still, because, by definition, they cannot be measured. What is the cost, in terms of loss of enjoyment and fostering a spirit of adventure, of building safer, but more boring playgrounds? Or, more to the point this year, what is the cost of dying alone? Or not having family visits? Or the emotional toll of losing a business?

In Alberta, more people have died from opioid overdoses in 2020 than from the coronavirus. It may be that the spike in overdose deaths has been caused by some pandemic policies. Pandemic deaths are largely among the elderly, and opioid deaths generally occur among those much younger, so if the pandemic restrictions increased the number of opioid deaths, the total life- years lost to those additional overdose deaths may have been greater than lifeyears saved due to the pandemic policies.

That can’t be known definitively, illustrating the impossibility of really knowing what a safety culture costs. But the costs are immense, and it would be helpful to approximate them.

That’s why one of the most fascinating academic papers of 2020 was titled, “Car Seats as Contraception.” Published over the summer in the Journal of Economic Literature, it first got some attention in the economic press and in some conservative publications, before landing on the front cover of The Economist in November.

In the paper, economists Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon argue that 40 years of increasing mandates for child safety seats in cars — in some places required for children up to eight years old — make it difficult to have three children in the back seat of a sedan. The third child means the added cost of a minivan. This has a measurable contraceptive effect — or at least a stronger correlation than many other explanations for declining birthrates.

Nickerson and Solomon estimate that car seat laws that have been put in place since 1980 have led to 145,000 fewer births in the United States. For every life saved by car seats, 141 children were never born. In 2017, 57 child deaths were prevented by car seats, but there were 8,000 fewer births that year.

The idea that keeping children safer leads to fewer children may seem counterintuitive at first. But it should be expected. If making something safer — children in cars — costs more, then it is not surprising that there is less of it. After all, that’s the whole point of the government’s highest priority policy: the carbon tax. If parents were levied a tax upon the carbon emissions of their children, we would have fewer babies.

Knowing the cost of safety does not determine whether it should be paid. My guess is that by large margins Canadian adults prefer boring playgrounds to exciting ones, and more child safety regulation rather than less. Yet measuring the cost of safety, even if in a rough and ready way, does at least remind us that we are paying a price for it.

What that price actually was in 2020 will be a key matter for investigation in 2021.

Or, more to the point this year, what is the cost of dying alone?