Emily Oster schools me on parenthood

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I’ve read a lot of Emily Oster over the past year. Her first book, Expecting Better, has become the data-minded parent’s bible on pregnancy. Her new book, Cribsheet, extends that analysis to the first years of life. Oster is an economist at Brown University, and what she brings to this particular pursuit is a passion for good evidence. And here’s the thing: it turns out that much of what we think we know about pregnancy and parenthood isn’t based on good evidence. Sometimes it’s not based on any evidence at all. This is, on one level, a conversation about some topics of particular interest to me right now — breastfeeding, sleep training, brain development — but, it’s also a conversation about a meta-topic of interest to us all: how we assume experts are basing their confident pronouncements on good data, when, in fact, they often are not. Book recommendations: Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted Americaby Beth Macy The Shakespeare Requirement: A Novelby Julie Schumacher The Odyssey by Homer (translation by Emily Wilson) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	you know, I remember bringing my daughter home and sort of carrying the car seat into the
0:03.7	house and putting it down and then being like, oh my god, it's going to wake up.
0:07.5	Like, what then what do we do?
0:09.3	Like, I have no idea what is happening here.
0:23.4	Hello and welcome to the Ezra Klein show on the Vox Media podcast network.
0:27.4	As you know, I had a child recently, which has been, I don't know, I don't know how you
0:33.0	talk about it.
0:34.0	That'll come up in this conversation that I really don't know how to talk about this.
0:39.0	And don't really feel comfortable doing it.
0:40.9	But like a lot of people of a empirical mindset, maybe I'll say, who had a child in the
0:48.2	last couple of years, I found myself really, really attached to the books of Emily Oster.
0:53.4	Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University of Fantastic Economist who
0:58.0	I knew just as a somebody who covered economics some years ago.
1:01.1	Let's go be here.
1:02.1	She's written two books.
1:03.6	One was expecting better why the conventional pregnancy wisdom is wrong and what you really
1:07.7	need to know.
1:08.9	And the new book is crib sheet, a data driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from
1:12.5	birth to preschool.
1:14.3	And what both of these books are, it's something interesting.
1:16.7	It's something very common in academic work and not at all common in books or journalism.
1:20.9	They're literature reviews.
	...

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