Emily Oster on Pregnancy, Causation, and Expecting Better

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2013

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

Emily Oster of the University of Chicago and author of Expecting Better talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book on pregnancy and the challenges of decision-making under uncertainty. Oster argues that many of the standard behavioral prescriptions for pregnant women are not supported by the medical literature. The conversation centers around the general issue of interpreting medical evidence in a complex world using pregnancy advice as an application. Alcohol, caffeine, cats, gardening and deli-meats and their effect on pregnant women are some of the examples that come up. The conversation closes with a discussion of Oster's work on hepatitis-B and the male-female birth ratio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:07.8	of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,
0:14.4	comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.5	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:32.9	Today is October 3rd, 2013, and my guest is Emily Oster of the University of Chicago.
0:39.6	She writes widely on development issues, women's issues, health, and she's also the author of
0:44.4	expecting better. Why the conventional pregnancy wisdom is wrong and what you really need to know.
0:49.8	Emily, welcome to econtalk. Thanks for having me. Our topic for today is your book,
0:54.7	Expecting Better. It's a guide to what we know and don't know about pregnancy. But it's also an
0:59.9	example of how to think about data and how to think about causation and correlation, a long
1:04.7	standing theme of this program. When you were expecting, when you became pregnant, you initially
1:09.2	thought you'd say in your book that the doctor was going to give you with information and evidence
1:13.8	about various phenomena that arise during pregnancy, the risks, the benefits, and you'd have to make
1:19.2	decisions along with, as everybody has to do, with under uncertainty. But that isn't the way
1:25.9	it turned out. What surprised you? I think the biggest surprise for me was I seemed to be unable
1:33.3	to get the numbers and the data from my doctor. So there were very many times in which they would
1:39.6	say, well, it's different for everybody or well, the numbers pretty small. Or, you know, we don't
1:46.4	really know, but to be safe, blah, blah. For me, the way that I think about decisions is I think,
1:55.6	okay, I need to get the data. I need some numbers. Then I will use that in conjunction with risks
2:01.3	and benefits and some simple decision theory to make these choices. Getting the actual hard numbers
2:08.2	was just very, very challenging. It wasn't something that was forthcoming from my doctor or from
	...

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