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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This was such a joy to listen to, Nellie made me laugh so many times, I relate to her in so many ways! I listened with my wife and we had interesting and long conversations afterwards, our son will be 2 in April!
I gotta say, this is disappointing, Bari. The discontent over Emily’s amnesty plea didn’t come from the political right thinking that Emily dropped the ball on advocating for kids’ mental and physical health. The problem was that Emily, herself, couldn’t wait to get experimental Covid mRNA injections into her kids…and everyone else…as soon as they became available, and now that the repercussions and irresponsibility of that decision are becoming painfully difficult to ignore, it rather looks like Emily (along with all the decision-makers/pushers) would like to sidestep any personal responsibility for her part in completely abandoning her own method of decision-making—that is, to look to the data SKILLFULLY in order to make an informed choice—falling victim to the fear propaganda machine that she had previously denounced, and peddling a lot of manipulated data to the public. For whatever unfathomable reason, Emily bought into the story of the experimental vaccine as the saviour and anxiously awaited the approval of mRNA injection for children, the safety of which was completely unsupported by data because, as an experimental treatment, there wasn’t ANY data for hardly anything. If “your unvaccinated kid is like a vaccinated grandparent”, then why the sudden desperation to start poking kids and pumping god-knows-what into their systems? There was a disturbing change in Emily’s tune that made me unsubscribe to her substack long ago. It is astonishing to me that you wouldn’t include this in your Covid discussion with her. The vaccination part of the discussion is glaringly absent. What gives?
Perhaps the idea of forgiveness and amnesty is very appealing to someone like Oster, who bought into the vax story, hook, line and sinker. If she can forgive and forget how manipulated SHE was (extending the benefit of the doubt here), then it is possible that she may BE forgiven as well, and nothing has to change…she doesn’t have to question the origins of the data in first place…she doesn’t have to second-guess the meaningfulness of her work, which she is admittedly loath to do, and which she is obviously relying heavily upon for her brand. I think Emily doesn’t want to face the reality of what she still seems to be refusing to look at. And you did her NO service by choosing to avoid this pretty important part of the story.
I gotta ask, as a new parent, are you wanting Emily to maintain guruship so much that you won’t ask the obvious questions? Just the same as Emily is clearly wanting the data to be sound so badly that she is advocating for sweeping it all under the rug and moving on with a clean slate?