The cult of Emily Oster
Emily Oster is sitting in the back of a car, checking her Garmin watch as we lurch through rush-hour traffic toward the Holland Tunnel. The Brown University economist doesn't like to keep people waiting.
As they wait for her to appear, the women are buzzing with excitement, comparing notes like fans in line for a Taylor Swift concert ranking their favorite songs."I asked her a million times about drinking and breastfeeding," one attendee says. "Iread self-help books," another declares to her seatmates. But a book by the most influential parenting expert since Dr. Spock? That's an exception.
Yet the antipathy Oster inspires is just as strong. Some epidemiologists, physicians, and public-health experts have bristled at an economist encroaching on their turf. In 2019, Lori Feldman-Winter, the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Section on Breastfeeding,that the way Oster interpreted breastfeeding data in"Cribsheet" ignored important protocols put in place by public-health experts.
The fact that Oster is such a polarizing figure may seem surprising to the people who meet her. In person, she comes across as grounded, warm, and witty — less of a rabble-rouser, more of a running buddy. We're around the same age, and I can imagine the type of friend she might be: the master planner, organizing dinner parties via Doodle polls and emailing detailed itineraries ahead of group trips.
As with many parents, Oster's schedule is driven by routine. On a typical day, she wakes up at 4:45 a.m., has coffee and graham crackers, and goes for a 6-mile run. She has breakfast with her family and then heads to Brown. Dinner is at 6, the kids go to bed, and she and her husband turn in at about 10 p.m. She's not big on TV but enjoys catching snippets of marathon races.
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