经济学人精读 | 车载儿童安全座椅

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本期导读

本文节选自《经济学人》期。如今，美国大部分地区要求八岁以下的儿童必须坐在安全座椅中，但这种对儿童安全的关心却使得越来越少的家庭选择“生三胎”。

Children’s car seats

Berth control

Child-safety laws may have surprising unintended consequences

IN THE EARLY 1970s American women gave birth, on average, to 2.12 children each. By 2018 that figure had fallen to 1.73. Many alterations in people’s lives have been invoked to help explain this change, including the facts that women now are better educated, more likely to have jobs or run businesses, and have better access to contraception than their antecedents of five decades ago. Also, demand for children to work as extra pairs of hands on family farms has dropped.

标题中的berth本意为“（船或火车等的）卧铺，舱位，铺位”，这里可以理解为指“安全座椅”，同时在读音上与“birth”同音，berth control 既表示“安全座椅的相关规定”，又表示“birth control”，可谓妙哉！

unintended 意思是“非计划的；无意的；无心的”，在这里类似于unexpected

其动词原形为 intend，意思是“打算；计划”

give birth to…是个动词短语，意思是“生孩子”，同时也可用作比喻义表示“孕育；产生；引起”：

It was the study of history that gave birth to the social sciences.

对历史的研究孕育了社会科学。

alteration 指“改变，变化”，类似于change，其动词为alter

invoke 意思是“提及，援引”

contraception 指“避孕（法）；节育（法）”

antecedent 意思是“ 祖先；先人”，常用作复数，与ancestor 同义。

None of these explanations, though, overlaps neatly with birth-rate curves. Other factors must be at work, too. And Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon, professors of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College respectively, think they have found an intriguingly counterintuitive one: America’s increasingly protective child car-seat laws.

overlap 意思是“重叠”

curve 指“曲线”，这句话直译为“上述解释并没有与出生率曲线完美重叠”，也就是说上面的那些说法并不能完全解释出生率的变化情况。

be at work 表示“起作用”，这也与前一句话相照应，一定还有其他因素在起作用。

intriguingly 指“非常有趣地”，形容词是intriguing，动词是intrigue

counterintuitive 意思是“违反直觉的”，counter- 是个词缀，意思是“逆；反对；相反；对立”；intuitive 指“直觉的”，其名词是intuition（直觉）

Their study, “Car seats as contraception”, published in SSRN, a repository for so-called preprint papers that have yet to undergo formal peer review, examines the effect that car-seat policies may have had on American birth rates between 1973 and 2017. During the Reagan era, only the truly wee—tots aged under three—had normally to be secured in child-safety seats. But states’ governments have, since then, gradually ramped up the requirements. Today, most places in America make children sit in safety seats until their eighth birthdays. That concern for youngsters’ safety has had the unintended consequence, Dr Nickerson and Dr Solomon suggest, of fewer three-child families.

repository 意思是“仓库，存放处”，这里是说SSRN是一种预印本数据库。

peer review 指“同行评议”，其目的是确定研究成果的真实性，重要性及原创性，从而把控期刊质量。

wee 意思是“很小的”，比如a wee girl

tot 指“幼儿”

ramp up 是个动词搭配，意思是“使…的数量增加”