Hello and welcome to an unbelievably special crib sheet edition of Slate Money.

Normally your guide to the business and finance news of the week, but we are

zooming back and out and up this week because the most special guest is in the studio with us.

I am Felix Hemel of Axios. Emily Peck of the Huffington Post is here. Anna Schumansky is also here, but most excitingly, Emily Oster is here. Emily, welcome. Thank you. We are going to talk about both of your books this week because they're both amazing. But tell us what they both are. The first one is called Expecting Better, Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong, and what you really need to know. it's about pregnancy and data. And the new book is called CribSheet, a data-driven guide to better, more relaxed parenting from birth to preschool. You really love the long subtitles. I do. I like the short first title on the long and the long subtitles. I don't have any control of the titles. They just,

they just were given to me. You get given the subtitle and then you write a whole book off it.

Exactly. We're going to be talking about rest feeling, lots of breastfeeding, and vaccination,

of course, and co-sleeping and parental intuition and birth rates and all manner of stuff. It's going to be an amazing show. And we also have a

really kind of awesome Slate Plus segment about women in the economics profession. So you're

going to love this episode. Stay tuned for this week's edition of Slate Money. So this is the first book, right? It's basically

most people get too stressed about most aspects of pregnancy if I had to boil it down to

like one sentence. Yeah, both of my books are kind of like that. Yeah, I mean, I think with the

pregnancy one, it's sort of like when you get so much conflicting advice and that this is, I think, for a lot of us, like the kind of the first time you're like interacting with the medical system and there's a lot of decisions and there's a lot of stuff you don't expect. And it's sometimes it'll sort of happen in the moment and then you're supposed to make some choice or it's like, oh, by the way, we're going to do this thing. And it's happening right this minute. You're like, well, wait, I didn't know about that. And then it's like sort of too late and you haven't had time to think about it. And so I think that's kind of the space that I was in when I wrote the first one. You say in the book, like your economist brain and training is sort of in opposition to the way physicians essentially work, whereas like all the decision making has already

been done and they just tell you what to do. Whereas like in your world, you look at all the evidence,

you can explain this better. And then you make the decision informed. Yeah. I think that I,

that economists are very accustomed to the idea that there's cost and benefits and we're going to weigh them and combine them with preferences and that that's sort of that idea that preferences might differ and that data we're going to evaluate data and combine it. That's that something that kind of economists do, I think more than in some ways more than physicians. I also think in this medical space, there kind of tends to be like, okay, somebody has read all this literature and they've like decided what the rule is and they've decided it based on, I don't know, some average person or sometimes just kind

of not really on any particular person. And then it's just like, okay, this is the rule. And I think

that I'm, economists are not comfortable with and I was not comfortable with the idea that there

was like a rule that a way that everybody had to behave. Do you think that there's a revealed preference to use one of my favorite economics terms

about doctors in the medical profession from what rules they come up with and how they

communicate them? I'm not sure I would use the phrase revealed preference for that. But I mean,

I do think that there's in a lot of these sort of medical spaces, and I've talked to doctors about this, they're like, you know, we don't have a lot of time. So I go through all this kind of nuance. Like we see our patients for, you know, I'm seeing 30 patients a day for six minutes. And so I don't have time to like kind of, there just isn't, there isn't time to sort of really get into this. And so it's very helpful to have rules and guidelines because then we kind of know what to recommend. And I think there there is value for that. I think for for the patient or for some kinds of patients, that interaction is frustrating. Part of what is valuable maybe about a book like this is to be able to say, okay, if you know what's coming, then you can make use of that six minutes in like a much more efficient manner rather than trying to get them to explain like all the options. If you sort of know what they are, you can do a little better. And I think this is significant just because I think historically, the relationship between women and the medical establishment has often been this idea of kind of women going in and a male doctor telling them what to do.

And with this idea that what a woman wants herself is not of much value.

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