Child car seats are a contraceptive! "No really"

I put the "no really" in scare quotes because, no, really, they're not, or at a minimum, there's no proof that they are, outside the obvious way, in which if you're parents with kids and want to fuck like rabbits away from your kids, child car seats make doing the grind in your car a lot tougher.

Some Zvi Mowshowitz, who I had never heard of but has a Wiki page, claims that, "no really" they are a contraceptive. His claim seems to boil down to the idea that most vehicles can't put three child car seats in the back seat, ergo, contraceptive.

Having apparently been a one-time contributor to "Less Wrong," which overstates the degree to which human rationality as consciously practiced by the average human being in everyday life can serve as a form of harm reduction, such nuttery (and it is) is not surprising. The reality is, of course, that two parents don't think, when fucking, "wait, I need to take the Pill/wear a diaphragm/wear a condom/get my tubes tied/get a vasectomy" because my Toyota Camry can't hold three child car seats in the back seat.

First of all, despite the hints that this might only be a rabid leftist case of overreach, right here in Tex-ass, the child safety law goes to age 8. But, it doesn't say that children over 2, or even under 2, have to be in a BACK seat. Definitely, since children over 2 are allowed in a forward-facing child seat, the presumption is, if it fits, that child seat can be in a front seat. So, Zvi, there's child No. 3 right there.

Second, beyond my hysterical send-up, seriously, parents wanting a third child don't think that way.

Thirdly, if they did, despite Mowshowitz talking about many people hating on minivans, stereotypically rational ones would love on them. (And, per my send-up, maybe love in them, too.)

But, that's not the biggie.

THAT is this, the old, and correctly phrased, scientifically skeptical phrase:

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

And, that's that.

IN reality, though, Mowshowitz hasn't even established correlation all that strongly, contra the mounds of links in his story.

They also have assumptions that aren't warranted. One mentions it's based on in-house two-parent families only. It also says that it estimates child car seats have cut into births since the 1980s, then admits that rising mandatory maximum child car seat age only started going up in the middle 1990s. I think that's called "petard hoisting."

But, you want better ideas than his to boost population growth?

First, it's called "national health care." You know, if having a baby ain't so fucking expensive, more people might have more.

Second, it's called "bigger child care tax deductions." He does mention child care credits in passing, but not enough.

Third, you want to keep kids safe? It's called "gun control."

Fourth, and as I tweeted in a thread, you want to keep kids safe, and connect this to vehicles? More, not less, federal regulation, namely, to put a cap on the height of pickup hoods and eliminate a horrendous front blind spot issue. LOTS of people have written about this.

Mowshowitz then moves to overall costs of child raising. He's largely right here, though his solutions don't include my No. 1 in the list of four.

He then posts a graph showing how birth rate declines with rising income, but claims: 

A weird dynamic to consider is that birth rates decline as economies develop, but also all the economic principles and observations of people’s choices say one’s willingness to have children declines as one’s economic situation worsens, once you control for someone’s social class and expectations.

No, really, in the face of evidence.

Or to put it better, he doesn't square "willingness" in the pull quote with actuality in the graph. Another big fat fail for someone touting rationality so much. 

In fact, to continue to direct quote him:

Thus, I can notice this… …and still expect that making a given person/couple’s financial life improve will in general will increase their birth rate, even if it’s not focused on things related to children, although that focus will certainly help. Part of this, of course, is that the graph does not represent one directional causation.

We seem in the land of hard-on level motivated reasoning.

There's yet other problems with the piece. 

One of them is snide sneers about people deciding to get tubal ligations or vasectomies because of climate change. Behind that, his argument for MOAR PEOPLE is offered without rational justification, surprising for someone who wrote stuff for Less Wrong, but actually not surprising. I'm assuming that Moswhowitz believes his idea is rationally self-evident. No it's not; show your work. Since you haven't in this piece, I'm assuming you know you can't, per hard-on level motivated reasoning.

Finally, citing neoliberal libertarians Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver favorably (and probably in other pieces) is a good way to "lose me" even more. 

He's not all bad. He's semi-intelligent as a data-cruncher on COVID, but I see nothing that puts him in the same playing field as Zeynep Tufekci, who he does cite in one piece.