When my wife Nellie was pregnant last year, we became obsessed with Economist Emily Oster’s book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know. Amidst a barrage of conflicting and confusing pregnancy advice, Oster laid out the data on everything we needed to know. Despite what doctors said, sushi, cheese, and the occasional glass of wine were all okay during those nine long months. It gave us the much needed calm we needed during a time of so much uncertainty.
With her two subsequent books Cribsheet and The Family Firm, Oster popularized a new phenomenon that has defined our generation of parents: data-driven parenting. It ditches the long lists of paternalistic rules, and instead examines peer-reviewed evidence and lets parents make their own informed decisions about their kids based on risks and tradeoffs.
Nowhere was the Oster mentality more front and center, and more divisive, than during Covid. She argued very early on in the pandemic for less draconian and more nuanced policies. She wrote pieces in the Atlantic like, Schools Aren’t Superspreaders and Your Unvaccinated Kids Is Like A Vaccinated Grandma, when those words were considered heresy. And while she made quite a few enemies on the left over the last few years, recently she wrote Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, and earned herself some enemies on the right as well.
Today, my wife Nellie Bowles joins me to talk to Oster about why a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University decided to become a parenting guru, how she used her parenting framework to become a leading expert on pandemic policies, and the unwinnable position of… actually following the science.
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I'm not a mom, but listen to Honestly often--and as someone who wrote about Oster's desire for a "pandemic amnesty," I felt I should hear her out. It changed nothing, really. Oster's nuanced response to her call for following the data during covid belies her own admission that she had her children yelled at other children to keep their distance and put their masks on. Outside. While walking past them. But more importantly, or perhaps tragically, Oster seems to think that this is all some sort of incompetent explosion of not following the data. Not once does she even make a possible conjecture that the data was manipulated (death rates, who is dying, what they're dying from), sometimes invented out of whole cloth (masks work, vaccines are safe and effective). Nor does she point out the most obvious data flaw; that during now a whole three years not one randomized controlled trial was done--not one. Not on masks. Not on the virus and its impact. Certainly not on vaccines. The failure of the CDC, NIH, FDA and WHO--are not merely failures, then--they are at the very least, some of them are--willful strong-arming of un-elected government officials over a supposedly free populous. It is a shameful period of our lives, and there is no guarantee that it won't happen again unless people of every political stripe choose liberty over this dangerous, even maniacal, money-grab/political control. Oster was more concerned about forgiving Fauci, Birx, Collins--the former and latter of the triumvirate who clearly worked to destroy the reputations of Dr.'s Battacharya, Kuldorf and Gupta, and Lord knows what else they did, though the Twitter files make it clear that at the very least, they--and actors within govt. up to and including the immediate former, and current POTUS's worked to remove the free speech rights of American citizens. And for that--we're supposed to call an amnesty? At least be a serious player, if you're going to play at all, Ms. Oster.
First, I love your podcast and have listened to literally every episode. Im really glad there is a way for listeners to comment on those episodes and interact with them. I really liked this episode and its definitely not the first time Ive bought a book after listening to the podcast. I just wanted to offer a thought on the question of why bars were open when schools werent and how a society could possibly allow or argue for that. My take is that it makes perfect sense when you consider the characteristics of Millennials and whatever that next generation of young adults is called. We live in an incredibly entitled and self-centered society and those are the two primary characteristics of these younger generations of adults. This is a result of the parenting styles of Gen X (everyone gets an award, helicopter parents, no suffering, etc) as well as of the effects of social media which is almost entirely about self-glorification. In your last podcast with David Sedaris, he makes a point about people going to art museums and taking selfies in front of the art, thereby placing themselves at the forefront and the art becomes secondary. I think that really speaks volumes to how these generations view the world and their place in it. For all of the talk of equity and whatnot, most of the energy and action is purely performative, again placing the "cause" in the background and themselves at the center. When considered from that standpoint, it makes perfect sense that these adults would prioritize their ability to blow off steam or whatever over the interests of children. You combine that with the plummeting birth and marriage rates and you have adults who are entitled and self-centered, many of whom have no idea of the sacrifice required to make relationships work in the long term and who have no kids, and it just sort of becomes the logical conclusion. We keep kids home to signal how altruistic we are and bars open so we still get what we need to maintain sanity. Its all about self-glorification and self-interest. A society that does not value or teach the value of self-sacrifice and instead promotes celebrity style self-indulgence is going to do a lot of pretty immoral things. Anyhow, thats just my take on it. Again, love the podcast (and really everything you all are doing here!)