When my wife—TGIF overlord Nellie Bowles—was pregnant last year, she became obsessed with Economist Emily Oster’s book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know. Amidst a barrage of conflicting and confusing pregnancy advice, Oster laid out the data on everything we needed to know. For example: despite what doctors said, sushi, cheese, and the occasional glass of wine were all okay during those nine long months. It gave us the calm we needed during a time of so much uncertainty.
With her two subsequent books Cribsheet and The Family Firm, Oster popularized a new phenomenon that has defined our generation of parents: data-driven parenting. It ditches the long lists of paternalistic rules, and instead examines peer-reviewed evidence—and lets parents make their own informed decisions about their kids based on risks and tradeoffs.
Nowhere was the Oster mentality more front and center—or more divisive—than during Covid. She argued very early on in the pandemic for less draconian and more nuanced policies. She wrote pieces in the Atlantic like, Schools Aren’t Superspreaders and Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like A Vaccinated Grandma, when those words were considered heresy. And while she made quite a few enemies on the left over the last few years, she recently wrote Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, and earned herself some enemies on the right as well.
On this week’s episode of Honestly, Nellie joins me to talk to Oster about why a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University decided to become a parenting guru, how she used her parenting framework to become a leading expert on pandemic policies, and the unwinnable position of actually following the science.
Listen here:
She retract and apologize for that dumb amnesty post yet?
"Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty" probably came from a well intentioned, if self serving place.
The problem that got her in real trouble, is it's typical The Atlantic bad journalism echo chamber bull.
She knew she was guilty - but of what, specifically, is so poorly spelled out it's no wonder the internet played T-ball with the article for a week.
To have an amnesty with someone - to make peace, you have to physically speak to them, hear and understand their greivances. She tried to make peace - but for what? This data scientist has no specific data on that point. This journalist certainly never spoke with, or quoted someone who could name her sins.
If you don't think the grievances of the other side are legitimate, you can't request amnesty for them - and should you?
Honestly, I don't know if the Honestly round table of reluctant democrat wine moms is the place to work this problem. But a good editor could have fixed the Atlantic article in about 5 minutes, and hopefully the Free Press will hire one to fix this and the #diedsuddenlty article that didn't mention the fact that it would be #miocarditis if that weren't banned.
(Editor- a twitter article about right wing suppression on twitter that doesn't mention twitter? Durring the twitter files drops? you guys wanna work this a bit?)