Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Emily, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
In addition to being a Professor of Economics at Brown University, Emily Oster is the founder and CEO of ParentData, a data-driven guide to pregnancy, parenting, and beyond. Emily is also a New York Times best-selling author, whose books include Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm and The Unexpected.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Emily Oster explore how parents can make data-driven decisions, whether screen time for kids should be avoided completely, and school closures during COVID.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You've carved out a very interesting niche for yourself in public discourse by doing something very simple: asking about important emotional decisions—a lot of them to do with parenting, some to do with topics like COVID and school closures—from an empirically informed perspective, and looking at which parts of the conventional wisdom are actually backed up by pesky things like studies. How did you fall into that role? What motivated you to ask these questions?
Emily Oster: I am trained as an economist and a professor of economics at Brown. The things that I do there are really about data and decision-making. So, I approach the world with that angle, thinking about how data can help us make decisions either about policy, which is more like my economist life, or about the other parts of our life, like parenting, pregnancy—in the context of things like COVID, for example. When I was working as an economist and a professor, I got pregnant, and I found myself wanting to use all of the tools that I had from my job in service of my pregnancy and later, in service of my parenting. It kind of snowballed from there. But it starts from the core professional belief that data can help us make decisions, which is what I think most economists believe.
Mounk: So you’re in the proud tradition of practicing the dismal science of using quantitative data to get people pissed off at you, which they often do. One example of this is about pregnancy. The standard medical advice is for mothers to not drink at all. You doubted that in your book on pregnancy. What's the basis for why we should mistrust that conventional wisdom? Again, just tell us a little bit about your process. How do you go about determining for yourself, and then sharing with your readers, how much you yourself might choose to drink during pregnancy?
Oster: I want to step back and first talk about what motivated this question and many other ones about pregnancy. When you get pregnant, people give you a long list of things not to do—don't drink, don't smoke, don't have deli meats, don't have hot dogs, etc. I wanted to understand why people were saying these things. Are some of them more important than others? What is the evidence behind them? That's partly because I'm just a person who wants to understand why I'm making the choices that I'm making. But it's also because, actually, you get quite varied recommendations—including about alcohol, depending on who you're talking to. Something like 40% of doctors in the United States will tell their patients that an occasional drink is fine. That, of course, is very different from the official guidelines. This leaves people with questions like, what do you mean it's fine? How did you come up with that? Why is it different from what someone else thinks? So, I approached that question.
When you look at the evidence on pregnancy, one thing that's crystal clear is that heavy drinking or binge drinking during pregnancy, even a couple of times, is dangerous. It can lead to negative outcomes for kids on many dimensions. But when you then look at the evidence on occasional or moderate drinking—meaning not more than one drink at a time—you don't see those kinds of effects showing up. We have a lot of data on that because alcohol consumption at those levels is much more common outside the United States. It's common in parts of the United States, too, but certainly in Europe, this kind of occasional drinking in the later trimesters is just something that more people do. So, you have better evidence making it clear that we don't see these negative effects.
That's the process I went through. I read hundreds of papers and wrote in a way that tried to help people understand why one might come to those conclusions. But, as with everything I do, I am not interested in telling people to drink or not drink. That is not the goal. I'm not interested in telling you to breastfeed or not breastfeed or to circumcise or not. I'm not interested in telling you what to do. I'm interested in helping you make decisions that work for you. So, would I encourage people to drink? No, definitely not. I would encourage people to read the evidence, think about their preferences and make decisions for themselves. That’s the core idea behind how we can be confident in our own choices.
Mounk: One thing that I think a lot of your findings have in common is that there's a kind of conventional wisdom which says this or that is bad and that we shouldn’t do them. And then, when you look at it, it turns out that we're at a level of abstraction that actually seems to mislead about the underlying data.
For instance, on breastfeeding, I believe there's a study which says that certain kinds of significant health outcomes may be causally related to not breastfeeding. Perhaps you're a little bit more likely to have colic or to have a cold at the age of two in a baby that is not breastfed versus in a baby that is breastfed. But, of course, the way in which most people then consume that information—whether in the form of doctors’ recommendations or in the popular press—is that there are really bad health outcomes when you don't breastfeed your baby. They take away that their child at 16 or 18 is going to have some seriously adverse health outcome and will not be able to lead a fulfilling life. But, that is just not what the underlying data shows.
Then, of course, there's a second question about whether we are dealing with causation as opposed to correlation. Is it that not breastfeeding really has that bad impact on the child, or do situations in which the mother might already be having health challenges—perhaps she's from a lower socioeconomic status or other things that might lead to worse health outcomes for the baby—also cause them to be less likely to breastfeed? Disentangle those two things for us.
Oster: It's a big question. Let me start with the first part. You have captured exactly what is really difficult about a lot of public health messaging, which is that in the service of trying to be simple, we have lost all nuance. So, if you think about some of the goals of public health messaging, it mostly seems to be, let's look at the world and decide which of these behaviors is better. By “better” we mean whatever has a positive impact. Breastfeeding is a good example. If you look at some of the really good data, I think we can reliably say that there's some small impacts on gastrointestinal illness in the first six months of life. In that sense, breast is best, since there are these positive impacts. That gets taken by the public health establishment and turned into the simplest version, which is just breastfeeding is better. Then, that message gets pushed in a way that convinces people to do it because the public health establishment is saying, we've looked at this data and we've decided it's better. What people hear is, breast is best, and don't you wanna give your kid the best start?
By the way, what they mean by the “best start” is a moderately reduced risk of gastrointestinal illness in the first six months. That is really different from what many people are hearing. I think that's one area where I do feel like there's a lot of potential for our public health messaging to better help people understand the true risks. Even if they want to keep it simple, they should at least give people a sense of how large the impact is and if it is possible that it's outweighed by some other factor that might be important to them.
There's a second part, and this also comes up in the breastfeeding case. A tremendous amount of our evidence is driven by correlation, not causation. So, in breastfeeding, if you look at the characteristics of people who breastfeed versus not, probably the most significant issue in that data is that, on average, having resources, more education, more income, a higher likelihood of being married—all of those things correlate with breastfeeding. Many of the long-term outcomes that we look at in studies say that kids who are breastfed perform better on their A-levels, or have better IQ scores. All of that kind of data is really driven by correlation. It's driven by differences across these groups. But it is not causal.
Mounk: Just to make that a bit clearer to listeners who are not social scientists: part of this is that the kinds of people who are particularly likely to be tuned into public health advice and to feel pressure on themselves to live up to it, on average, might be people with a higher educational and socioeconomic status. Those things are so powerfully related to these other outcomes that you might get this confounding variable. You might get this appearance of a causal effect when it doesn't exist.
Oster: Absolutely. What you're saying is that the people who are breastfed are different from the people who are not. This is probably not because of the breastfeeding itself, but because of other characteristics. We know that to be true because when we look at data where the researchers are able to adjust for differences across families, you see the effects of breastfeeding get much smaller, or are even zero. So, that tells us that a lot of what we're seeing in some of this correlational data is really not about breast milk. It's about mom's education or mom's resources in some way, or about dad's presence or whatever it is.
Mounk: Of course, part of this is that the gold standard in medical research is randomly controlled trials, but we can't tell mothers to randomly breastfeed or not. That would be unethical.
Oster: We do actually have a little bit of randomized trial data on breastfeeding, and it basically doesn't show what these correlational studies show. You're right, you absolutely cannot force people to make feeding choices—but you can encourage more people to breastfeed. The data is not especially large. It's one large trial, but it exists and gets overwhelmed in the discourse by these flawed studies which reinforce what many medical practitioners already think. This is a more complicated thing, but I think there's a sense that, if we all think breastfeeding is great, and we've all told everybody that breastfeeding is great, seeing a study that says breastfeeding is great makes us think that the study must be right because it reinforces what we already thought.
Mounk: Some other studies that also have a smaller effect are sibling studies where there are siblings from the same family that end up being breastfed and not breastfed.
Oster: Yeah, I think outside of randomized trials, the sibling studies are probably the best we have because the mother is typically constant. You can look at them and at least know that the family circumstances are the same. Those studies show very little effect on any of these long-term outcomes.
Mounk: There's an interesting dynamic here. I was joking earlier about the reputation of economists as practicing the “dismal science.” They have the reputation of just looking at quantitative data in this kind of cold-hearted way. I think critics of your writing might sometimes say, hang on a second, shouldn't we just prioritize doing the best for our kid under any circumstance? But, in a weird way, I think that the insights you're sharing with us also liberate people to take other things into consideration. For example, when you start public health advice with a study that shows that gastrointestinal illness is stronger at six months, and therefore breast is best, people feel that all the other considerations in their life—does my work schedule actually allow me to breastfeed all the time? Do my parenting norms actually allow me to breastfeed all the time?—take a back seat, and they become overwhelmed by that kind of data.
I'm really struck by an observation from a friend of mine, who did want to breastfeed her first child and for whatever reason the child wasn't taking to the breast. She realized that she ended up having a much more co-equal parenting relationship with her husband because, of course, when the mother is the only source of nourishment, it makes it harder for the father to play an equal role in the household. But because they were bottle feeding—which is not what they had planned to do, but it’s what ended up happening—she felt that made it much easier for her husband to be the one who gets up at 3 a.m. to go feed the baby. So, in a weird way, in this case, the dismal science is actually allowing people to make decisions in a way that also reflects those other considerations that are not easily quantifiable.
Oster: Absolutely. I think that we ignore individual preferences when we give this blanket advice that is supposed to be best for everyone: For every single family in every circumstance, the best thing is for kids to breastfeed. How could that be true? Think about the variation across human experience, the circumstances they're in. How could it be that this recommendation is correct for everyone? And the answer is it's not, because what we need to do is think about how the data combines with the constraints and preferences that people face. That's such a clinical way to say it. That's how economists would say it: We're going to take the evidence and combine it with preferences and constraints. What we really mean is that the things that you care about and the values that you hold should be an important part of your decision making. The data should also matter and it's worth looking at. There are places where the data is clearer about some behavior, where I think it should matter more. But in areas of parenting, the evidence just doesn't say that one thing is so enormously better that it shouldn't be outweighed by, or incorporated with, other things like preferences.
Mounk: The other thing that's interesting to me—where an analytical look may result in another way of thinking about things—is how do you trade off between the interests of different people who constitute a family? It seems to me that one of the things that drives a lot of the conventional wisdom—whether that is from public health authorities or from parents—is that under no circumstances can they do any harm to the child. In every circumstance, prioritize the interest of a child over all other interests. So a potential, small adverse health outcome from drinking a glass of wine in the seventh month of pregnancy or from not breastfeeding has to take absolute priority over everything else.
Of course, the same is true later in childhood—like, is there a potential benefit from driving my child to this extra enrichment class in ballet or violin? Well, what a monster I would be if I didn't give them that opportunity. But, of course, life is full of trade-offs and the family has trade-offs between the interests of children and parents. How should parents think about that?
Oster: You exactly hit on the messaging parents get: if there's any suggestion that this behavior would be harmful to their baby, they shouldn't do it, even if it were infinitely valuable to them. Similarly, what if I don't take them to violin class and there's a quarter of a percent chance that they could have played one time at Carnegie Hall? That's it, I've ruined everything. The constraints of the parents or the preferences of the rest of the family are just not relevant. I think that this is not a very healthy way to operate. But I think it really puts pressure on families to not think in big-picture terms about the fact that, even if you only care about the outcomes for your kids, having parents who are happy with the choices that they have made and who like to enjoy their lives actually does matter.
This comes up sometimes in conversations about breastfeeding. People—including doctors—will tell me, look, I would much rather have a mom who is not depressed and is using formula than a mom who is depressed because they are killing themselves trying to breastfeed and it isn't working. That's not a good trait even if you thought there was some small gastrointestinal benefit to doing it. I think that this current generation of parents too heavily prioritize their kids. I love my kids. They do come first in a lot of ways, but there's also a little bit of put your own oxygen mask on first, which I think we miss. If you aren't breathing, protecting your marriage, and doing things that fill your bucket some of the time, you are not going to be a happy person and that's gonna make you a worse parent, even if that were the only thing you care about. This is a very hard thing to say because immediately people assume it is very selfish.
Mounk: Let's distinguish between two strains of this conversation. One is the way to push against a mistaken cultural norm where the children always have to come first and how that’s actually not good for the kids. If you're really struggling to breastfeed and it means you have to get up in the middle of the night every time, and that leads you to be depressed, that is going to have a much worse impact on the child than the difference between breastfeeding or not. That seems very plausible to me.
I'd love for you to tell me whether this is founded empirically or not, but there are studies where if you ask children at most ages, what is the thing you most wish to change about the parenting you had?, they don't say that they wanted to go to an extra sports club or whatever. They say, I wish my parents were less stressed. So actually, whatever you can do to have them be less stressed feels like a really important thing for the well-being of those children, especially if we believe what they're telling us. I agree with you that there are going to be many contexts where there isn't a trade-off. Both the parents and the children would be better off if the parents make sure that they are happy and healthy individuals. Their relationship is so strong together that perhaps there's some relaxed family time every now and again, rather than just rushing from one class to another. I would love to hear more from you on that.
Also, I didn’t expect you to flinch away from the hardest question. I'm going to push you on it. There are going to be times where there's a real trade-off. Your child really wants to go to a class, but you’re just exhausted—they’ve already been to three different classes, and you don’t know if you have it in you. Or take a glass of wine: it's unlikely that one glass is going to be the difference between you being depressed or not, or that it’s somehow going to have a huge benefit for your child. But even if the risk is low, as you’re saying, there's still a trade-off. There might be a small risk for your child on one side, and on the other, there’s your ability to enjoy something—to have a moment of sociability with friends and indulge in a glass of wine. That feels like a genuine trade-off. So how should parents think about that? And what's the case for sometimes putting their own interests first?
Oster: It's so interesting that you mentioned flinching because I think I do. We all sort of flinch about that because it's very hard to say, I'm going to choose this because I like it, even though it's not as good for you. So I think we are always looking—as parents—for some potential benefits for the child. I do think there's more cases where, if it is something that makes you happy, that actually is good for your kids. I think we also need to make it okay for parents to say: sometimes my kid will suffer in a small way because I’m choosing something I enjoy. In my case, I love running—I do it a lot—and my kids don’t like that. It definitely makes me a worse parent sometimes. If I go for a long run in the morning and then have to parent all day, I’m not at my best. I’m cranky, I’m tired, and I’m shorter with them than I should be. But that’s a trade-off I make, because running matters to me—it’s something I care about just for myself. It really is worse for my kids in some ways, but I still do it. I could say it’s good for them to see me enjoy something, which is probably true. But it’s also okay to say: there are multiple people in this house, and everyone’s preferences matter—even if some matter more than others. And it’s just not true that our kids’ preferences matter more than everything else. But it’s hard. Even now, I catch myself thinking, well, it’s actually good for my kids that I ran 22 miles. But it’s not good for them. It’s not good for anyone.
Mounk: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not yet a parent, so perhaps it's easier for me to say that because I don't picture my children and feel guilty.
Oster: My son's like, I can't believe you're gonna do this. You're abandoning us. You can't, how can you? You're not walking us to school. I love when you walk us to school. You care more about your running than you do about me. That's what he told me once. And I was like, that's not true in the aggregate.
Mounk: It's really important for children to learn that they're not always the center of attention. That does seem to be true in general. I think one of the differences in cultural norms about parenting in the United States and in Europe, for example—particularly in Southern Europe—is that in the United States, there's this expectation that when you're spending time with your kids, they need to be at the center of attention. I think that leads to all kinds of bad behavioral traits. I’m not talking about the old fashioned, be at the dinner table, but don't be heard. But rather, hey, we're adults, we're having a fun time together at this family dinner and we wanna have a real conversation. Of course, the kids are gonna be part of the conversation. Of course, the son's gonna interrupt to make a request or ask a question. They also need to understand that there are other people with their own interests and they wanna have a serious conversation about other stuff and it's not all about them. I actually think that that is a really healthy part of a child’s upbringing.
But, of course, that again goes back to the rationalization of things by saying they are good for kids. And as someone who doesn't have a kid, I want to say that if you have a broadly utilitarian outlook on the world—which I don't in every respect, but I think it's good for a lot of moral questions—it's just not right that we should give some tiny marginal improvement in the happiness of a child more importance, at the greater cost of the happiness of the parents.
Oster: Yeah, I think some parenting approaches suggest that that trade-off ratio should basically be infinite, and I think that's hard to defend. The ratio shouldn't be one. It shouldn't be that one unit of my happiness for one unit of yours.
Mounk: Right, and perhaps that's a choice that—to some extent, in a theoretical manner and every day in some practical manner—parents have to make all the time.
Now, one very big question that people ask about is screen time. There is a real sense that there is a mental health epidemic among a lot of teenage girls in particular. My frequent podcast guest, Jonathan Haidt, has a powerful book arguing that point. Beyond that, there’s this idea that even a little screen time early in childhood—before we’re talking about social media, Instagram, and so on—might impact attention span and brain development. For example, giving an iPad to a two or three-year-old. What does the evidence say about screen time and social media?
Oster: I think those things are pretty different. Let's start with the screen time question. The data that people bring to bear on questions like the impact of screen time on the development of two-year-olds is really bad. It is far worse in terms of the correlation versus causation problem, than the breastfeeding evidence. In some ways, it should be very easy for people to understand this. Take one example: studies comparing kids under one who watch more than four hours of screens a day to those who watch none. Then they look at developmental measures—say, test scores—when those kids are five or six. But if you ask someone to imagine a household where a one-year-old is watching four to six hours of TV a day, and another where the one-year-old watches none—do you think those households are otherwise similar? I think it’s hard to imagine they would be. And in fact, the data shows they’re not. But they’re not just different in obvious ways—they differ in all kinds of ways, many of which we can’t measure. So maybe those kids are different for reasons unrelated to screen time. It’s very hard to say, definitively, that screens are the cause. When I talk to parents about this, I try to frame it as: screens aren't inherently bad or inherently good. Screens are really just something that displaces other activities. So rather than treating them like a boogeyman, it helps to think in terms of opportunity cost. It’s probably better for your kid to be reading a book, spending time with family, or sleeping—activities we know have clear benefits. Screens are more neutral. The question is: what are they replacing? But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do any screens. If they have an hour of screen time while you're cooking dinner so that they can then be ready to have that nice family dinner and be in a good place, that's fine. And there isn't anything in the data that would say that it's not. I think this is an area where it helps to structure the choice, set boundaries, and avoid having screens everywhere all the time. But at the same time, it is not helpful to assume that any amount of screen time is terrible, because that is just not supported by the data.
Mounk: That's a really helpful framing actually, which slightly changes my instincts about this. The obvious part of this is, you have to wash up or clean up or do some kind of errand. How do you make sure that you can do that while your child is happy and entertained rather than being in the way and making you cranky? Let them watch something on the iPad or play something, perhaps educationally, perhaps not. They're not going to have a very meaningful experience during that hour in any case, so that's okay. But, if the thinking is, I'm too lazy to read the kid a story at that time, and I'll just give them the iPad at that time, that feels really bad, because this is an important family ritual, and this is a moment where they're actually going to be learning a lot. How would you think about an in-between case? You're taking the kids to a restaurant for dinner. That feels to me like one of the cases where the iPad is the most useful because, perhaps they're about to have a meltdown or get bored or annoyed. So, giving them the iPad is a great way to be able to have a restaurant experience for the parents and that's important for their happiness. Maybe they have a friend visiting who they really want to connect with. On the other hand, perhaps that precisely is the kind of experience where it's important for children to understand that this is a social experience where they’re not at the center of attention, that this is part of what it is to grow up and to be a member of a family unit. Perhaps a little bit of boredom and frustration is, in fact, a helpful educational experience. How would you puzzle through that case?
Oster: I would just tell parents that they have to make that decision deliberately, based on what they’re trying to accomplish. What is the purpose of going out to dinner? Is it that you would like to have a date with your spouse and you can't get a babysitter? There's no child care option but you just really want to spend some quality time with your spouse? I think in that case, it may well be the right solution to give the kids an iPad. Another thing you could say is, I would like to go out to dinner because I want our family to be a family who can go out to dinner and sit together and talk and order from a menu. That's an experience I want my kids to be able to have when they grow up. In that case, adults shouldn’t sit at dinner watching videos on their phone. That isn't the goal of dinner. Here, I would say that you should not have iPads at dinner because it is not accomplishing your goal, even though your kid might be kind of whiny and having trouble sitting down. So it's not definitely terrible to have iPads at dinner or not. The question is, what are you trying to accomplish? If we ask that question around our use of screens, I think we'll be in a much better position to scaffold the boundaries in a way that we can then tell our kid where the boundaries and expectations are. That is going to make it much easier to hold the boundary, if you've told the kid in advance what it is.
Mounk: Amazing. What about social media? Now we're not talking about two or three-year-olds at the restaurant whmo we're trying to distract for half an hour, we're talking about how bad an impact things like Instagram and TikTok have on self-image, on the mental health of teenage girls, for example.
Oster: I wish we had better data here, because the data we have is not perfect. The best of it, I think, is from the introduction of Facebook, which definitely suggests some negative impacts on mental health. It's clear there's a fair amount of variation. Some kids do seem to benefit from the connections they can make on social media. It seems like, on the net, they don't benefit and that the kind of experience, particularly for teen girls around things like Instagram and TikTok is not very good. There are many reasons that explain this. The platforms are not showing real life, but when you are a teenage girl, maybe you think they are. You're there and you're seeing people whose skin looks great and you're thinking, my skin doesn't look great even though I bought all the products that this person said. That's because it's a filter. But kids in this age range do not have the frontal lobe structure that adults do. I think it makes it very hard to process things in a positive way. So yes, the data does not suggest very good things about teenagers and their exposure to social media. I'd separate that, by the way, from phones. I think there's other reasons we should hold boundaries on phones. But I think phones and social media are two pretty distinct things.
Mounk: So I take that as an empirically cautious vote that Haidt may be onto something, but we need more data to confirm that.
Oster: Yeah, I would love to have more data to confirm that. But I would say I'm an empirically cautious voter in favor of at least being more careful. There are parts of Jonathan Haidt’s work that I agree with even more strongly. I don't think we should have phones in schools. That's actually pretty separate from this. You don't need a video game that's pinging you every 20 seconds while you're trying to learn math.
Mounk: Your writing has informed a lot of my thinking on the specific questions that we've touched on. I'm trying to think of how it adds up to an overall attitude to areas like parenting. I think a lot of what drives that anxiety, about having a glass of wine, and shepherding kids to that extra ballet class, is a sense that the fate of these children is in our hands and that what we do at every moment is going to really add up to determining the future. It is in our hands whether we're going to bring up a happy and healthy adult who gets accepted to Brown University or a drug addicted and depressed dropout who lives in my basement for the rest of time. I would love to hear your take on the overall data about how much parenting actually matters? Is it just a matter of obviously avoiding being physically abusive with children, avoiding traumatizing them, and keeping them alive? Or does it depend on broader questions of socioeconomic status, genetic inheritance, and opportunities in the society? Do you think that those smaller-range decisions actually add up to making a real impact on the trajectory of children on average?
Oster: I think one of the things that seems to be true of modern parenting is that people view every moment of their parenting as an opportunity to ruin their child forever. They think that if you rush them out the door in the morning, that could be it; that could be the decision that ruins them for their whole lives. Of course it is not true, but it imbues every interaction with an intense sense that it's the be-all and end-all. When you look at the data on what matters, I think it is two-fold. One is that there's a lot of evidence that the first three years matter a lot. When kids show up in kindergarten, there's huge differences across socioeconomic status. Even before they've been in any formal schooling, we see kids who have grown up with more resources doing way better.
Mounk: A quick question about this—how do we know that that is rooted in parenting practices of the parents in those first five or three years, rather than genetic inheritance or other things that may not be down to their parenting choices?
Oster: That’s a great question. Some of it we know from what kinds of impacts you can have with simple parenting interventions, which can improve some of those outcomes. And some of it is by looking at how much we can catch up with things like Head Start. We know that if you try to equalize things in those early years, you get more equal outcomes early on.
Mounk: And what are the most powerful of those interventions?
Oster: Here are the things that seem to be really important. Kids having enough to eat. Kids having a stable place to sleep. Kids having someone in their life who is a consistent and positive force, not being abused and yelled at. There is maybe also a little bit of evidence that having access to some books and some reading can improve school readiness. These things are basic, but they are also very hard and many kids do not have access to them. So it isn't like saying that these things are so easy anybody could achieve them. There are many kids in America and elsewhere that don't have access to this, but they are pretty fundamental. If we give our kids those things, that is 95% of the way to what we are trying to accomplish. And then, you can ask questions like, how can I train my kid to win the math Olympiad? If your entire goal is to train your kid to win the math Olympiad, you probably can make a little bit of progress by doing more math. But at the end of the day, that's probably not really your goal most of the time. If your goal is to raise a happy and healthy adult, you may not achieve that, but the things that you can do to influence that are pretty basic.
Mounk: Let me put what you just said in a slightly more polemical way and see if you agree. Let's distinguish between public policy in a deeply unequal society like the United States, where there is widespread poverty despite overall wealth, and the kinds of questions the average listener of this podcast might be asking themselves. That is why I think it is important to specify which interventions actually matter. When you say the first five years of life are really important, what some of my listeners might hear, and what I initially heard, is something like, oh no, I have to make sure story time is a full hour instead of thirty minutes, and I must never hand them the iPad. But most of the people listening to this podcast can give their kids enough to eat. Hopefully, they have a stable and loving relationship with their child. Hopefully, they are not physically abusive. Those are not the questions they are wrestling with. So the message to them might simply be: do not worry. On the other hand, if you care about children in the United States or around the world, maybe the focus should be on ensuring child benefit payments, housing stability, and food security for poor parents. That is by no means an easy task, but it can make a huge difference. So perhaps, if we care about children in general, our energy is better spent there than on marginal improvements in our own parenting routines?
Oster: You could not have said it better. I think that these conversations about being the optimal parent are happening in spaces where they’re already doing everything that actually could matter. We're not having the conversation about how we think about the right policies to support parents more broadly, and families more broadly, where kids do not have access to these pretty fundamental needs.
Mounk: What about beyond the age of five or six? One thing that I'm sure a lot of listeners to this podcast really worry about is school choice. How much do those kinds of things matter for outcomes?
Oster: Parents ask a lot about school quality. I think the reality is that much of the variation in school quality—which in the United States we typically just measure by test scores—is just driven by differences in the kids who show up at the school. Schools that are in rich areas do better. And that's not really because of what the school is doing. That seems to be mostly because of the kids that they get as inputs and what the parents are doing. We have a little bit of evidence around how we can provide better school quality to kids who would not have access to high quality public schools. Charter schools tend to have better outcomes than the district public schools, at least in urban areas. We know, in general, that smaller class sizes are better. Certainly, if you look at private schools, the outcomes there are on average better. But again, that's probably a lot about who the kids are, who is coming into the school and not what the school is doing. So the landscape of school choice is pretty tricky and it's not usually very obvious. Especially in the United States, so much of the variation is just about family variation and not about anything systematic that we're doing within the school.
Mounk: One of the things that strikes me as odd about this whole conversation is that it's a strange mix between altruism and egotism. On the one hand, there's this expectation that you completely prioritize your children over everything else, that you put them above everything, that you don't have that glass of wine, that you do bring them to that extra ballet class, that you spend a lot of financial resources on making sure that they go to a marginally better private school and so on. It is a way of showing how altruistic you are. At the same time, of course, there's a great egotism involved in this. How these children are going to fare depends on me, on what I do. Look at the agency I'm having in determining what's going to happen 70 years later to this being that's under my care. Do we need to unlearn both the excessive altruism and the excessive egotism?
Oster: Yeah, we are not helped by thinking of our children as something we are trying to accomplish. That has a flavor of both of those things. Parenting is the thing I'm going to win. I'm going to be the best at it and like my kids are going to be the outcome of that winning. I think this puts far too much stress on our kids. But I think it also gives us too much of the illusion of control. What we do on these smaller scales probably doesn't matter too much. Also, that whole atmosphere forgets an important part of parenting, which is why many people become parents in the first place. Your kids are really fun. My kids, for example, are great. Spending time with them is genuinely enjoyable. I think they are interesting and wonderful people. If we only think of kids as people we are serving, or as tools to further our dynastic aspirations, we lose sight of the fact that they are interesting and fun people. We probably like them, in part because they are like us. I think about that a lot in the conversations happening in policy circles about why people are not having kids. We often present parenting as an incredibly hard job. And yes, parts of it are hard. You are tired, and it can be exhausting. But it is also amazing to have people in your life whom you cannot believe you love so much. It is a completely unique and deeply interesting experience, and we lose sight of that when we treat parenting as just another job where you are supposed to achieve a promotion.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Emily discuss how data was used to justify decisions during COVID, and how to communicate scientific information when our knowledge is constantly changing. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
