On X.com Matt Yglesias posted a chart that sparked some conversation about child safety:

One thing about the much-lamented rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities is that kids have in fact become a lot less likely to die. pic.twitter.com/MTjR7spLM8

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2023

Of course, it was probably more his comment about the “rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities” that generated the feedback and pushback. And I assume his comment was partially tongue-in-cheek, as often happens on Twitter, and designed to generate that very discussion. Still, it is worth thinking about. Exactly why did that decline happen?

I’ve posted on this topic before. In my March 2023 post, I looked at very broad categories of child death. While all death categories have declined, about half of the decrease (depending on the age group, but half is about right) is from a decline in deaths from diseases, as opposed to external causes. And fewer disease death can largely be attributed to improvements in healthcare, broadly defined. Good news!

Of course, that means that about half of the decline is from things other than diseases. What caused those declines? Let’s look into the data. Specifically, let’s look into the data on deaths from car accidents.

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