In the introduction to her 2013 book Expecting Better, Emily Oster compares the experience of being pregnant to being a child.
“Medical care during pregnancy seemed like one long list of rules,” Oster writes, recalling her experiences of near-constant judgment from friends, family and doctors about everything from what she drank or ate to how much weight she gained. “There was always someone telling you what to do.”
Almost a decade later, Oster, now a mother of two, recalls how a then-University of Chicago colleague once scolded her for ordering a Diet Coke with ice. “I told myself, give me a break. I don’t need that right now,” she says with a laugh. “And I’ve built an entire career on it.”
I lunch with the latest in a long line of chart-topping parenting experts, from pediatrician Benjamin Spock—whose 1946 guide The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is among the bestsellers of the 20th century—to more contemporary figures such as Heidi Murkoff, author of the What to Expect When You’re Expecting series, and Tiger Mom Amy Chua.
Oster is an “unapologetically data-driven” economist who says her goal is to use number crunching to “create a world of calmer pregnant women and parents.” She argues that microeconomics can provide parents with a guide to making decisions on matters ranging from whether it is safe for a pregnant woman to enjoy a cup of coffee or a glass of wine to how much screen time children should spend. Her conclusions are often more laissez faire than doctrinaire, rejecting conventional wisdom and, in some cases, official medical advice.
As an expectant parent, I am full of questions. But since my due date for my first child is only a month off, Oster and I don’t have time.
We’re sitting at Salted Slate, a bright, casual restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, a stone’s throw from Brown University, where Oster is a professor of economics. Oster barely looks at the menu before choosing a Caesar salad—shredded romaine, radicchio, creamy dressing, focaccia chips and parmesan—with salmon “light on the dressing.” I follow her lead, choosing a chopped salad with tomatoes, hearts of palm, garbanzo beans, feta, avocado and a hard-boiled egg. She refuses a drink; I order an iced tea with lemon.
I think some people felt like: what are you doing? It’s not a serious thing
In addition to writing bestsellers and fulfilling his academic responsibilities, Oster has a bi-weekly newsletter on Substack with more than 100,000 subscribers. She speaks in an exclusive clip. When I ask her to describe what she does for a living, she says that until recently she would have called herself an economics professor.
“If I was presenting at the faculty meeting, I wouldn’t be like, by the way, I also have this great Substack newsletter,” she says. “But you know in a lot of other settings, that turns out to be the thing that people care about.”
She launched her online newsletter, ParentData, in February 2020 as an offshoot of her books. The first post focused on reassuring pregnant women about the extremely low risk of contracting the Zika virus, a disease that can cause birth defects in unborn babies and was an epidemic in America in 2015 and 2016 but is now almost unheard of westwards. But the focus of the newsletter changed with the advent of Covid-19, after a flood of questions from readers about the dangers of everything from sending children to daycare to allowing them to see their elderly grandparents.
We come at a time when the White House insists that Covid “should no longer control our lives” – but ahead of a recent decision by US regulators to approve Covid vaccines for children under the age of five. Oster generally agrees that America is at a turning point, but admits that for many of its loyal readers, moving on may be easier said than done.
“Almost every week there is a question that is: How risky is it to fly with my five-month-old? And people want an answer like “one in 3,427,” she says, referring to a weekly question-and-answer session she hosts for her more than 140,000 Instagram followers.
“People are looking for: Is it over? . . . When will it be done?” she adds. “It’s not going to end the way you have in mind, in the sense that you can remove that risk. . . But I think that’s what people are looking for.
The Salted Slate 186 Wayland Ave, Providence, RI 02906
Caesar Salad $9 with Salmon $7 Chopped Salad $12 Iced Tea $3 Tea $3 French Press Coffee $4 Total (Inc. Tax) $41.04
For her part, Oster says she has a “regular life” in Providence, where she and her husband, Harvard economist and MacArthur Fellow Jesse Shapiro, live with their two children. Academia is a world she has been immersed in since birth. The daughter of two Yale University economists, she grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her mother, Sharon Oster, was the first female dean of the Yale School of Management, while her father, Ray Fair, became famous in the 1970s for the accuracy of his model for predicting presidential elections.
She first appeared in an academic publication as a toddler—not as the author but as the primary subject of the case study “Crib Tales,” a series of psychological essays analyzing the then-two-year-old Emily’s bedtime conversations with her parents and chatter to herself . As an adult, Auster wrote a foreword to an updated edition of the volume.
She recalls enrolling at Harvard with ambitions to be a biological researcher, but changed course after working part-time in a fruit fly lab, where she sustained a repetitive strain injury dissecting larval brains. She found a second research role with a professor of public policy. “By the end of the summer, I said to myself that economics is for me,” she says.
“I wasn’t very intentional about choosing a field,” she says, adding that she wouldn’t advise younger colleagues to chart a similar course. “By the time I started my first job, half of my work was in development economics and half of my work was in health economics. It’s a tough CV,” she says. I ask if she thinks this is why she was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. “I think that was part of everything,” she says. “I think there were a lot of other things.”
When pressed, it’s clear that Auster believes that publishing Expecting Better — which has been described as a cross between Freakonomics and What To Expect When You’re Expecting — thwarted her academic ambitions. The book has become a cult favorite among highly educated women, mostly in their thirties and forties, as they walk the path to motherhood.
Oster admits that when she first pitched the book to publishers, she described her “core audience” as “college-educated mothers who live in [Brooklyn’s affluent] Park Slope” — and while its readership has expanded over time, the demographics of its most loyal readers have largely remained the same.
But as is often the case in academia when a professor writes a bestseller, Oster says her colleagues weren’t as enthusiastic. “When you’re a junior lecturer in an academic department, your job is to write articles that get published in economics journals. To write a book about your pregnancy journey, even one and perhaps especially one that . . . using my experience in my work in service of my pregnancy, it’s really weird,” she says.
I ask if she thinks sexism is involved in skepticism. Oster raises an eyebrow. “I think it would be hard to describe our industry as female-dominated,” she says, adding: “If I had written [the book], but it was about sports, would it be different? Perhaps.”
Does she regret writing the book in the first place? She pauses. “No. But I think up until about two years ago I would have said yes,” she says. “Just thinking about the impact the book has had on people who like it and the impact it has [her second book] Cribsheet had . . . I find these things really valuable and I think that compared to the contribution I would make to the world in writing articles, it is greater.
For nearly a decade, Expecting Better has sold more copies each year than the year before. Oster notes about seven times as many copies sold last year than in the book’s first year in circulation. “I didn’t sell that much the first year. . . but it’s definitely a big delta,” she says with a laugh. “I believe in comparative advantage. I think that’s my comparative advantage.”
A smiling waiter clears our nearly empty plates and asks if we want anything else. Oster orders coffee with milk; I get a cup of mint tea. Our conversation turns to what it’s like to move from the hallways of the ivory tower to the gritty town square.
Auster may have legions of devoted fans, but he also has his detractors. They challenge everything from her views on pregnancy and child-rearing to her stance on the pandemic, which has drawn the ire of teachers unions, epidemiologists and even some fellow economists.
During the pandemic, Oster emerged as one of America’s most vocal advocates for reopening schools and loosening restrictions on children, especially as many classrooms across the US remained closed even as restaurants and bars reopened, and children in the UK and Europe have resumed attending school.
She wrote several articles in national outlets under headlines like “Parents Can’t Wait Forever” and “Schools Are Not Super Spreaders,” which divided opinion as Americans became increasingly polarized about Covid. She later launched the Covid-19 School Data Hub, a database of information on school reopenings, Covid cases and mask wearing in…
Add Comment