Read: There’s a better way to parent: Less yelling, less praise “At every stage, I am surprised at how parenting forces me to recognize the things I simply cannot command.” “I learned that while good logistics and decision-making helped us navigate this strange and hard moment, they couldn’t give me control,” she writes. But like a lot of us, Oster feels humbled by the pandemic. Oster has come to represent a certain mode of thinking about statistics and risk that can feel alienating or callous to some people who are worried about COVID-19.
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But when the stakes are collective-when one mom’s choice to send her daughter to school could affect the health of another child-lots of people do get angry. Getting mad about the way other people use data to make individual parenting decisions is a little silly. Her new book, The Family Firm, is an ode to rigorous decision making: Oster and her husband-also an economist-run their household like a business firm, she writes, employing many of the same principles she taught to M.B.A. Oster’s various projects are all arguably connected by a single worldview: Data are useful for guiding our choices, including what we feed our kids or whether we send them to school during a global virus outbreak.
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Recently, she has also been a vocal advocate for opening schools during the pandemic, based on data she collected suggesting that in-person instruction can be safe with some mitigations in place. To be clear, Oster does no such thing: She’s an economist who has become semi-famous for her books on data and parenting decisions. When I was reporting a story on how progressive communities have approached COVID-19 lockdown restrictions this spring, she showed me an email she got from a random person who had written to all of her bosses at Brown University, accusing her of promoting genocide.
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Emily Oster is a popular target for irrational hatred.