Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you with your

most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy, by practical

wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Practice what you preach.

If you haven't read Emily Oster's work, then your wife probably has.

She's a wonderful, brilliant economist, who also has a brilliant newsletter, whose work focuses

on parenting and children and its intersection with data and economics. It shouldn't surprise us

that her work is brilliant and often contrarian, given the unique childhood

that she had.

Oster was the child, two professors at Yale.

Her mother and father did more than just interesting work.

They showed it to their children, expanding their minds and their perceptions in the process.

As a recent Bloomberg profile explains, the

Austrofair's brought economic instruction home. Food shopping was a lesson in opportunity

cost. Time was valuable, so Sharon faxed the grocer a list instead of walking around the aisles.

Fair would dismiss his children's pleas to switch to a shorter toll booth lane by citing no arbitrage

condition, which assumes that because everyone is optimizing all the time, the possibility to improve

is marginal. Feminism was demonstrated, not simply discussed. The couple alternated nights fixing

dinner, despite Sharon's being a better cook, to show that it wasn't solely a woman's job.

Sharon didn't change her last name upon marrying, and she and her husband flipped a coin to

decide whose Emily would take, Sharon told me, to let the children reflect upon the nature

...