The Economist Who Says Schools Are Safer Than You Think
EMILY OSTER IS a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University—not the usual launching pad for gurudom. But she is nonetheless the sage at the center of a low-key cult. She popped onto the scene when her dissertation findings on “missing girls” in China were picked up by Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner but ascended to a higher plane when she applied her background in health economics and statistical methods to pregnancy and childbirth in her 2013 book Expecting Better. She did the same for toddlers and infants in 2019’s Cribsheet; a third book in the series, The Family Firm, will be out this summer.
In a certain parental set, Oster’s books are passed around slightly furtively, with the air of letting someone in on a secret. Her goal is to help parents translate academic literature into actionable items, but she often ends up serving as a counterpoint to the anxious, overcautious parenting advice doled out in glossy mags and on playgrounds.
When you are an economist who tells pregnant women that research suggests it’s OK to have the occasional wine and sushi, you will be welcomed as a liberator. When you explain that sleep training and formula don’t show serious long-term negative effects, you will be worshipped. You will also be vilified by the keepers of the conventional wisdom, of course, and Oster has gotten her share of hate mail.
Enter COVID-19. As the pandemic shuttered schools for months, especially in coastal cities, Oster wondered whether that decision was justified. Unsurprisingly, given how new the disease was, not much definitive scholarship was available. More surprisingly, there wasn’t much good raw data either. No one seemed to be keeping track of what schools were doing and whether there seemed to be any impact on postivity rates.
That’s how Oster found herself serving as a COVID-in-schools data miner and later as a cautious advocate for reopening schools, a case she made in such outlets as, , and her own Substack newsletter. Messages like “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders” and “Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever” have earned her the same mix of grateful relief and furious suspicion as did her previous work.
