Glenn Beck, the popular and outspoken Fox News host, had harsh words for the N.F.L. Tuesday night, saying the league was mistreating its players by requiring them to wear helmets.

Beck pointed out that helmetless players in the Australian Football League sustain concussions at much lower rates than N.F.L. players (sidestepping the issue that they are playing a fundamentally different sport). Because the league does not protect them with helmets, he said, Australian players have learned how to protect themselves.

“Which one is more compassionate?” Beck said. “The intentions of the N.F.L., or the people who give their players no helmet? I contend no helmets. Look at the systematic failure here: the more protection large entities provide, the riskier your behavior comes.”

Beck has made clear that the real subject wasn’t football but the Democratic Party, which Beck says should “stop protecting people from their own mistakes” when it comes to its economic and health care policies. But he is echoing a discussion that has been taking place over the last month about whether, theoretically at least, football would be safer without helmets.

The debate was spurred by an article in The Wall Street Journal by Reed Albergotti and Shirley S. Wang under the headline, “Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?”



The basic argument in the article is that hard-shell helmets, while reducing the chances that players would be killed, also “created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often.” Recent research has showed that these repeated collisions could lead to long-term damage.

There could be other benefits to getting rid of helmets, Albergotti and Wang wrote.

“It would bring down the cost of equipment, which can be crippling for some schools. A slower game might also be more palatable to some parents. And with their heads uncovered, football players might be more attractive to endorsers.”

Stephen Dubner, a co-author of Superfreakonomics, took up the issue on The Takeaway. He acknowledged that removing helmets from football players is not likely to happen any time soon, but also argued that such unthinkable changes could happen.

“There are … things that are not repugnant that become so. Racism and sexism for instance, which used to be fully accepted in a lot of societies. The sale of human eggs and sperm, for instance, used to be repugnant. Some things change. Is it impossible to imagine that what some people see as barbaric behavior among humans in playing football the way they do at that level — at that crash level — will become repugnant over time? It’s not impossible to imagine. I wouldn’t bet on it any time soon, but you have to ask at a certain point, is this worth considering?”

Dubner cited arguments that seat belts made drivers more reckless. He is skeptical about such claims, saying that drivers still have pretty strong incentives not to crash while wearing them. But he did add that Nascar drivers seemed more willing to crash after better safety mechanisms made them less likely to die. Changes to the Nascar point system that gave drivers credit simply for finishing the race seemed to help reverse this willingness, he said.

The underpinning idea behind these arguments is the Peltzman Effect. The effect, as described by the AEI-Brooking Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, “arises when people adjust their behavior to a regulation in ways that counteract the intended effect of the regulation. So, for example, when the government passes a seat belt law, some drivers may respond by driving less safely.”

The idea that less protection is more in violent sports predates this latest surge in interest, as proponents of bare-knuckle boxing will tell you. The Independent (London) ran an article in 1994 exploring the idea after the death of Bradley Stone, a 23-year-old boxer:

“There may now be further calls for protective headgear. Yet that, like gloves, could have the opposite effect, by increasing the amount of punishment that boxers can absorb without reducing the battering effect. Reverting to bare knuckles might, paradoxically, do more good. Short-term damage would increase, and it would not be a pretty sight on television. But there would be fewer punch-drunk ex-boxers being looked after by long-suffering relatives or nursing homes.”

It’s hard to imagine football without helmets — where would the logos go? But is there anything to be gained from continuing this line of reasoning?