Episode 468: Emily Oster

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Emily Oster is an economist, professor, and author. Her new book is The Family Firm. ”[COVID] has been 18 months of being a person who is slightly more public, who is saying things that are somewhat more controversial, where people yell at me a lot. ... I do much less reading of the comments than I did early on because I found that eventually I just got mad and that's not a productive way to interact. And it affects how I think about what I write, and I would like what I write to be the things that I think are true, not the things I think will avoid people being angry.” Show notes: @ProfEmilyOster emilyoster.net "Steve Cohen-Backed Radkl Hires DeFi Trader Aaron Lammer" (Nick Baker • Bloomberg • Nov 2021) Expecting Better (Penguin Books • 2014) Cribsheet (Penguin Books • 2020) The Family Firm (Penguin Books • 2021) Oster’s Parent Data newsletter 35:00 "Antibiotics and Allergies, Zika, Travel Baby Carriers..." (Parent Data • Feb 2020) 36:00 "Grandparents & Day Care" (Parent Data • May 2020) 36:00 "She Fought to Reopen Schools, Becoming a Hero and a Villain" (Dana Goldstein • New York Times • Jun 2021) 36:00 "Emily Oster, the Brown Economist, Is Launching a New Data Hub on Schools and the Pandemi." (Dana Goldstein • New York Times • Sept 2021) 36:00 "Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders" (The Atlantic • Oct 2020) 37:00 "Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma" (The Atlantic • Mar 2021) 42:00 Oster’s COVID-19 School Response Dashboard 44:00 "Emily Oster Thinks of Herself As an Expert on Data in Parenting, Not Parenting Itself" (Alex Hazlett • The Cut • Aug 2021) 45:00 "Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from US States" (Clare Halloran, Rebecca Jack, James Okun, Emily Oster • NBER • Nov 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Longform Podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe, co-host of the show, along
0:11.1	with Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer. Aaron Lammer recently the subject of a profile in Bloomberg.
0:17.0	How you guys doing? Thank you so much for saying that. Now we get to put it in the show notes.
0:21.3	That article is amazing and I feel like how dare you. I heard from dozens of people in my life
0:26.8	or just like Aaron Lammer, the world's most interesting man. Please. This segment can end soon
0:32.8	enough. Who's on the show this week? For today's show I spoke to Emily Oster. She is a professor
0:39.6	of economics at Brown, but maybe more well known to our audience as the author of three books,
0:45.9	including Expecting Better, which is about pregnancy, and then two more about parenting,
0:51.6	crib sheet, and most recently the one that just came out is called the Family Firm. I don't know if
0:56.5	you guys know, but I like the occasional parenting book. I don't mind a little parenting advice.
1:02.5	And a lot of those books are truly terrible, but I have found hers to be the exception to that.
1:07.4	She focuses on using her economics perspective, her understanding of how data is applied
1:14.0	to look at a lot of issues around both pregnancy and parenting. And she has a newsletter called
1:19.6	Parent Data, which she's been doing since 2020, but it turned out to be almost exclusively about
1:24.8	COVID and kids. So she's kind of experienced the maelstrom of criticism that comes with writing
1:30.4	about that topic. And we talked a lot about that. We talked about being an academic and writing
1:34.6	for a popular audience and a bunch of other stuff. It was a great conversation.
1:38.8	I was exposed to some of her birth related content by my partner. And it's basically the only
1:46.2	child related content I've ever consumed. So it's deeply affected by world view. And I'm really
1:52.4	looking forward to this interview. She debunked several notions I had about what you're supposed to
1:59.1	do around child birthing. So I'm looking forward to this one. Oh, by the way, we are produced in
2:05.6	partnership with Vox Media. They help us make the show. We thank them for it. Thanks Vox.
	...

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