Emily Oster Econ Brn
emily oster econ covid bogus study tyler cowan KOCHADEMIA
National Bureau of Economic Research Research Associate 2015-Present
Tyler Cowen is the chair of economics at George Mason University, faculty director for the Mercatus Center, and created Emergent Ventures in 2018. He is a coauthor of the economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounded Marginal Revolution University, offering free online education. ^8
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6 26 SOME TALK FETAL ALCO
Emily Fair Oster (born February 14, 1980) is an American economist who has served as the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Brown University since 2019, where she has been a professor of economics since 2015.[1][2] Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research was brought to the attention of non-economists through the Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Oster is the author of four books, Expecting Better, The Family Firm,[3] The Unexpected, and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting.[4][5] Oster is also the founder of ParentData.org, a data-driven parenting information platform.[6][7]
Early life
Oster was born on February 14, 1980, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her parents, Sharon Oster and Ray Fair, were both professors of economics at Yale University.[8][9] When she was two years old, Oster's parents noticed that she talked to herself in her crib after they left her room. They placed a tape recorder in her room in order to find out what she was saying and passed the tapes on to a linguist and psychologist with whom they were friends. Analysis of Oster's speech showed that her language was much more complex when she was alone than when interacting with adults. This led to her being the subject of a series of academic papers which were collectively published as a compendium in 1989 titled Narratives from the Crib.[10][11]
After graduating from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1998, Oster studied economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts. She then did doctoral studies in economics at Harvard under Michael Kremer. She received a Ph.D. in 2006 with a thesis titled "The Economics of Infectious Disease".[1][12][13]
INSERT
Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964)[2] is an American development economist currently serving as university professor in economics at the University of Chicago and director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.[3][4] Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020.[4] In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee,[5] "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."[6]
In addition to his academic appointments, Kremer is the co-founder of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),[4] a member of the National Academy of Sciences,[4] and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.[7] In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.[3] Kremer is also the Scientific Director of Development Innovation Ventures,[4] a program of the United States Agency for International Development aimed at maximizing the impact of development spending through rigorous impact evaluation.[8]
...
Species endangerment
In other theoretical work, Kremer studies the optimal policy responses to species endangerment. In a paper with Charles Morcom in the American Economic Review,[50] Kremer argues that because the price of ivory is positively associated with poachers’ incentives to kill endangered elephants, governments should accumulate stockpiles of ivory, releasing them onto the open market when elephant populations reach dangerous levels.[37][51] He argues that doing so can counteract increased incentives to poach, thereby preventing species endangerment.[37][51]
The policy value of Kremer and Morcom's work was criticized by Erwin H. Bulte and co-authors, who argue in a reply in the American Economic Review that government ownership of ivory may incentivize the preemptive extermination of endangered species, thereby allowing stores to be legally sold under CITES.[52] They propose instead that stores of ivory are managed by intergovernmental conservation organizations who do not face the same incentives as governments to maximize revenues in the short-term.[52]
...Their work has inspired randomized evaluations of several novel policy solutions to public sector absenteeism, such as camera[62] and mobile phone based[63] monitoring schemes.
ENDIT
Career
From 2006 to 2007, Oster was a Becker Fellow at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago, where she was an assistant professor at the Department of Economics from 2007 to 2009, an assistant professor at the Booth School of Business from 2009 to 2011, and an associate professor from 2011 to 2014.[14][1] She became a tenured associate professor of economics at Brown University in 2015, where she has been a full professor of economics since 2016 and the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence since 2019.[1][15][5] She is also the CEO of ParentData, a data-driven website she founded in 2020 that explores parenting practices.
Oster has been a research associate at the NBER since 2015, where she was a faculty research fellow from 2006 to 2015, and has been an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 2014.[1]
Oster's research focuses generally on development economics and health. In 2005, Oster published a dissertation for her economics Ph.D. from Harvard University, which suggested that the unusually high ratio of men to women in China was partially due to the effects of the hepatitis B virus.[16] "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women,"[17][11] pointed to findings that suggested areas with high hepatitis B rates tended to have higher male-to female birth ratios. Oster argued that the fact that hepatitis B can cause a woman to conceive male children more often than female, accounted for a bulk of the "missing women" in Amartya Sen's 1990 essay, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing."[18] Oster noted that the use of hepatitis B vaccine in 1982 led to a sharp decline in the male-to-female birth ratio.[11] Sen's essay had attributed the "missing women" to societal discrimination against girls and women in the form of the allocation of health, educational, and food resources.[11]
In April 2008, Oster released a working paper "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China" in which she evaluated new data, which showed that her original research was incorrect.[19] Freakonomics author Steven Levitt saw this as a sign of integrity.[20]
In a 2007 TED Talk, Oster discussed the spread of HIV in Africa, applying a cost-benefit analysis to the question of why African men have been slow to change their sexual behavior.[21]
In 2026, Oster launched the "Wellness, Actually" Podcast with Dr. F. Perry Wilson on iHeartMedia to combat social media misinformation surrounding wellness topics.[22][1]
Books
In her book, Expecting Better, published in 2013, Oster criticizes conventional pregnancy customs, taboos and mores. She discusses the data behind common pregnancy practices and argues that many of them are misleading.[23] As of March 2019, the book has sold over 100,000 copies.[24] A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2021.
In the book, Oster argues against the general rule of thumb to avoid alcohol consumption while pregnant, contends that there is no evidence that (low) levels of alcohol consumption by pregnant women adversely affect their children.[25] This claim, however, has drawn criticism from the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome[26] and others.[27]
Her second book, Cribsheet, was published in April 2019 and was a New York Times* best seller.[28][29] It evaluates and reviews the research on a variety of parenting topics relating to infants and toddlers, including breastfeeding, safe sleep guidelines, sleep training, and potty training.[30][31] The week of April 28, 2019, *Cribsheet was also the best selling book in Washington, DC according to the Post.[32]
Her third book, The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, applies to school age children. A review discusses the relationship of her parenting approach to more permissive parenting ideas dating back to the pre-Reagan era.[33] Oster suggests that parents run their families like firms in order to maximize their children's' advantage over others.[34]
COVID-19 and schools
Oster was an advocate for opening schools during the coronavirus epidemic, spearheading a project to collect data on the spread of coronavirus in schools,[35] and appearing frequently in media discussing why schools should open. In early October 2020, she wrote an influential and much cited article in The Atlantic entitled "Schools Aren't Super-Spreaders" which inspired numerous articles.[36][37][38] Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the CDC cited Oster's work as a reason to open schools during the pandemic.[39][40] In August 2020, Oster launched a dashboard compiling information on the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Critics of Oster's dashboard said it had methodological problems that they believe undermine its usefulness.[41]
On May 18, 2021, Oster published another piece in The Atlantic titled "Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma", which generated much heated response.[42] The controversy surrounds Oster use of vaccination as an individualistic risk-reward proposition, insinuating that unvaccinated kids are still relatively safe from COVID, and the lack of mention of kids being spreaders of the infections themselves.[42] Critics pointed out such rhetoric may lead the lay audience to wrongly believe there is no urgent need to vaccinate.[42]
In September 2021, Oster launched the COVID-19 School Data Hub which includes information on virtual and in person status of schools across 31 states. According to The New York Times, the data hub is "one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to document how schools operated during the pandemic."[43]
Personal life
Emily is the daughter of Sharon Oster and Ray Fair, both professors of economics at Yale University. She married Jesse Shapiro, also an economist,[44] in June 2006,[45] and they have two children.
:{:{References...}:
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CV
Brown University
Economics
Professional Experience
Founder and CEO, ParentData 2020-Present
Executive Director, COVID-19 School Data Hub 2021-Present
Brown University Department of Economics
JJE Goldman Sachs Professor of Economics 2023-Present
Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence 2019-2023
Professor of Economics 2016-Present
Associate Professor of Economics (with tenure) 2015-2016
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Associate Professor of Economics 2011-2014
Assistant Professor of Economics 2009-2011
National Bureau of Economic Research
Research Associate 2015-Present
Faculty Research Fellow 2006-2015
University of Chicago Department of Economics
Assistant Professor of Economics 2007-2009
Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory
Becker Fellow 2006-2007
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Harvard University, 2006
B.A., Economics, Harvard College, magna cum laude, 2002
Publications:
“ Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. School Districts” (with
Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran and James Okun) American Economic Review: Insights, 5(2) (July 2023)
“Changes in Household Diet: Determinants and Predictability” (with Stefan Hut)
Journal of Public Economics, 208 (April, 2022)
“Impact of School Opening Mode on SARS-CoV-2 Community Incidence and Mortality” (with Z Ertem
et al). Nature Medicine 27 (12) (2021)
“Effectiveness of three versus six feet of physical distancing for controlling spread of COVID-19 among
primary and secondary students and staff” (with Polly van den Berg et al). Clinical Infectious Diseases
(2021)
“Disparities in learning mode access among K–12 students during the COVID-19 pandemic, by
race/ethnicity, geography, and grade level—United States, September 2020–April 2021” (with Rebecca
Jack et al.) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 70.26 (2021): 953.
“Effectiveness of three versus six feet of physical distancing for controlling spread of COVID-19 among
primary and secondary students and staff: A retrospective, state-wide cohort study” (with Polly van den
Berg et al). Clinical infectious diseases: an of icial publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of
America (2021).
“Health Recommendations an ... AM ECON IMNSIGHTS
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A site to discuss education and democracy
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Why Do Rightwing Foundations Fund Emily Oster’s Work on COVID and Parenting?
Early in the pandemic, an economist at Brown University named Emily Oster gained extraordinary media attention for the advice she offered. She wrote multiple articles declaring that it was safe to open schools even without the funds needed to pay for extra safety precautions. She wrote, she was written about, she became the go-to person with “evidence” that schools were safe from COVID.
Oster’s research is funded by leading rightwing and libertarian foundations, organizations, and individuals. As the linked article by epidemiologists Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman explains, Oster’s emphasis on individualism and personal choice ring sweetly in the ears of the rightwing philanthropists.
They write:
Oster’s influence on the discourse around COVID in schools is difficult to overstate. She has been quoted in hundreds of articles about school pandemic precautions and interviewed as a guest on dozens of news shows. Officials from both parties have used her work as justification for lifting public health measures. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cited her study while announcing an executive order banning school mask mandates, while CDC Director Rochelle Walenksy referenced Oster’s research in anticipation of relaxing classroom social distancing guidelines. Oster also co-authored an influential school reopening guidance document that was released in early 2021.*
But despite its prominence, Oster’s work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grantsfrom the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.*
Although she claimed that her work was evidence-based, the authors show that her evidence was never as conclusive as she argued.
Cartus and Feldman draw a straight line between Oster’s views about COVID and the billionaire-funded attack on public schools. It is no accident that the same people who support charter schools and vouchers also support Oster.
What’s in it for the billionaires? Oster spreads the gospel of choice, they write, a philosophy of looking out for #1, and ignoring social responsibility.
They write:
{Oster is far from the only person to apply an economic style of reasoning to the U.S. education sector. There exists an entire ecosystem of “education reform” organizations that have spent decades attempting to subject schools to market conditions, promoting “school choice”, (i.e., charter schools, some of which are for-profit). This necessitates, among other stances, taking a harder line against organized labor. When the pandemic arrived, billionaires and right-wing interests invested in neoliberal “education reform” saw an opportunity to advance their interests: breaking unions, promoting charter schools, and undermining public education.
Oster’s preference for individualism, the rhetoric of choice, and economic reasoning over structural and collective justice-based conceptions made her—as an impeccably credentialed and high-profile economist prior to the pandemic—a valuable “expert” ally in their crusade to reshape U.S. education. Indeed, when the pandemic began, these groups promptly expressed interest in funding her work on COVID in schools….*}:
Throughout the pandemic, Oster’s advocacy has helped make the “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instructionin favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. The direction of her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal publichealth measures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices that can be decided through cost-benefit calculations.*}:
The irony of the Rightwingers’ support for Oster and her “data-driven” approach to COVID is that it stands in sharp contrast to their total disregard for data or evidence about charter schools and voucher schools. The evidence favoring charter schools over district schools is scanty; the evidence of the failure of vouchers is overwhelming. But the funders don’t care.
The bitter struggle over COVID in schools, conducted with the rhetoric of “choice,” opened up space for an alliance between affluent white liberal parents and a right-wing propaganda infrastructure devoted to destroying unions and public schools. For instance, John Arnold, the former Enron executive behind the eponymous Arnold Ventures (which funds Oster), has used the pandemic to attack teacher’s unions and further his goal of dismantling public pension funding, much of which is allocated to unionized public school teachers. The pandemic also provided an opportunity to increase charter school usageat the expense of public school enrollment. It gave plutocrats like the Waltons yet another chance to attack teachers’ unions by painting their demands for safer working conditions as irrational. By advocating reopening in (another Walton grantee) during a period when the Chicago Teachers Union was campaigning for stronger COVID rules, Oster helped the Waltons do precisely that.*}:
To see all the links and read the full article, open the link.
Diane Ravitch's Blog
John Thompson: Emily Oster Was Wrong About the PandemicJanuary 15, 2023In "Accountability"
Rachel Cohen: Emily Oster Was Too Optimistic about Children and COVIDOctober 29, 2020In "Accountability"
Emily Oster: Schools Are Not Super-Speaders of COVIDOctober 10, 2020In "Health"
CategoriesAccountability, Charter Schools, Economics, Funding, Health, School Choice, Science, Walton Foundation
CITED BY ATLAN MO AND NPR NYT?
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PROTEAN
OF the numerous political battles sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most bitterly contested have taken place over K-12 education. Schools have been a site of decisive struggles over the norms, values, and policies of the U.S. response to the public health crisis. While teachers collectively fought for stronger COVID mitigation measures, a small but vocal minority of parents confronted school boards in acrimoniousmeetings, demanding an end to remote instruction and mask mandates. These local skirmishes took place against the backdrop of successive COVID surges and a national media narrative that cast doubt on the usefulness of public health measures. It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response, which has left over one million people dead, without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation. And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster.
Oster’s influence on the discourse around COVID in schools is difficult to overstate. She has been quoted in hundreds of articles about school pandemic precautions and interviewed as a guest on dozens of news shows. Officials from both parties have used her work as justification for lifting public health measures. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cited her study while announcing an executive order banning school mask mandates, while CDC Director Rochelle Walenksy referenced Oster’s research in anticipation of relaxing classroom social distancing guidelines. Oster also co-authored an influential school reopening guidance document that was released in early 2021.
But despite its prominence, Oster’s work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.
Oster is a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown University. But prior to COVID, she was better known to the public as the author of popular books on pregnancy and parenting. These include Expecting Better (2013), Cribsheet (2019), and The Family Firm (written partially during the pandemic and published in 2021). The unifying theme across all three books is that conventional parenting advice—from experts in medicine, public health, education, and child development—is often wrong, and is based on irrational and overly cautious decisionmaking processes. In each book, she encourages readers to apply the analytical tools of economics to the multitude of choices that arise during pregnancy and parenting. Oster typically criticizes the quality of a few peer-reviewed studies that justify conventional advice, then offers her own recommendations on a range of topics—from eating deli meats in pregnancy (all are acceptable, other than turkey) to whether to send children to public schools (charters are often better in urban areas).
If it’s not already obvious, Oster’s readership skews female, white, affluent, and liberal. Some in this audience might be surprised that her books, which to a casual reader appear chipper and apolitical, have been roundly embraced by right-wing think tanks, including the Manhattan Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute. (Oster was even invited to speak about Cribsheetat Cato’s Washington headquarters in 2019.) Why might a book about parenting appeal to the Cato Institute? One answer is that Oster’s books popularize what Elizabeth Popp Berman calls an “economic style of reasoning,” which emphasizes individualism, market-based choice, and efficiency, while deprioritizing concerns related to injustice or collective well-being. Since the dawn of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, the economic style of reasoning has been an important ideological tool in the effort to expand corporate power; its propagation is the raison d’être of groups like the Cato and Manhattan Institutes.
The economic style of reasoning has attained considerable cultural influence, extending far beyond the cloistered, technocratic corners of policy analysis. Some of this influence can be traced to the 2005 publication of Freakonomics, by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt, which applied economic reasoning to social phenomena. Freakonomicswas extraordinarily successful, selling 4 million copies. (It was also, critics charge, rife with errors and misrepresentations.) Levitt was instrumental in launching Oster’s career as an author of popular economics books, using his massive platform to publicize her work.
Oster is a clear successor to Levitt: in her books, she extends the economic style of reasoning to pregnancy and parenting. These are two areas of contemporary life that are shrouded in superstition, anxiety, and mistrust, and are dominated by (usually male) medical authority: areas in which a lot of women are desperate for reasonable-sounding advice. The books are narrow in scope, and they emphasize the primacy of individual choice, hewing closely to normative attitudes and corporate-rationalist modes of thinking. The Family Firm, for instance, addresses household interpersonal dynamics by asking readers to consider familial relationships as a business manager would. The books employ language familiar to their target market: affluent cisgender women of reproductive age, a lucrative reader demographic with an enormous appetite for practical self-help guidance.
Oster’s books all utilize atype of cost-benefit analysis that rejects theprecautionary principle. Long embraced by environmentalists, trade unionists, and public health experts, the precautionary principle comes into play in scenarios of scientific uncertainty about risks of harm; it holds that decisionmakers should err on the side of minimizing or eliminating a potential hazard, even if this might prove to have been an overreaction once more research becomes available. Business interest groups, in seeking to expand corporate freedoms, use and promote the exact opposite interpretation of uncertainty. For example, industry groups might argue for permitting a novel pesticide to enter the market while evidence of its carcinogenic potential is still being collected. There is a bias towards interpreting uncertain and inconclusive research findings about health risks as evidence of no risk—a glaring fallacy that serves the needs of profit.
The general tone of Oster’s books is that pregnancy and parenting advice that is based on the precautionary principle is oppressive to mothers, as it imposes needless worry and restricts their choices as individuals. One particularly controversial example from Expecting Better involves guidance on drinking alcohol during pregnancy. Oster’s treatment of this topic starkly illustrates just how central the rejection of the precautionary principle is to her thinking.
Pregnancy is difficult to study epidemiologically; accordingly, it’s difficult to ascertain the effects of alcohol on pregnancy outcomes. Oster tells her readers—correctly—that the epidemiologic studies connecting light drinking to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and other adverse outcomes are of relatively low quality. Oster interprets the inconclusive state of the science as evidence of no risk—and, on this basis, gives her readers permission to consume up to two drinks per week in the first trimester, and one drink per day later in pregnancy. Contra Oster, various professional associations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, also correctly claim that no amount of alcohol has been proven safe to consume during pregnancy. Oster is openly critical of these messages, sensing a note of paternalism in the recommendations: “I’m not crazy about the implication that pregnant women are incapable of deciding for themselves—that you have to manipulate our beliefs so we do the right thing.”
The underlying message that Oster imparts to women—that learning to make the right choices is the key to resolving their overwhelm and anxiety—is perhaps so resonant with her affluent readership because it gives them the illusion of control over the fate of their children in an increasingly precarious and brutal world. There are millions of people in the U.S. who are highly economically and socially privileged, but not so privileged as to guarantee their children a future spot in the upper echelons of the social hierarchy, as Richard Reeves points out in his analysis of Americans in the top 20% of income distribution. The intergenerational transmission of class status (or the work of ensuring that their children “make it”), falls, like most parenting responsibilities, disproportionately on women. Upper-middle class mothers are doubly burdened; they face pressure to ascend a career ladder of their own while also performing the extensive and unpaid social reproductive labor of raising children and preparing them for future success. (Though some of the less glamorous aspects of this care work may be outsourced to working-class women, often women of color.)
Beyond imparting a sense of control, the rhetoric of “make smarter choices” accords with a version of feminism to which many already subscribe. The abortion discourse since Roe v. Wadehas conditioned many Americans (and this demographic of women in particular) to equate choice and its exercise with freedom, justice, progress and, critically, empowerment. Elizabeth Lanphier has written about how the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice” conceptualizes bodily autonomy as a kind of private property right. Sophisticated critiques of this mainstream “choice” rhetoric have been advanced by Marxist feminists, Black feminists, and other feminists of color in the reproductive justice movement. They emphasize its too-narrow focus on the legal right to choose abortion over the entirety of conditions affecting reproduction, its exclusionary failure to meet (or even apprehend) the needs of poor women and women of color, and its overreliance on legal strategies rather than movement-building. In contrast to the economic style of reasoning, reproductive justice articulates a collective concept of freedom, requiring attentive engagement and struggle over questions of power, resources, and material redistribution.
Oster represents the inverse of this systemic, structural critique. In The Family Firm, her treatment of K-12 education, she once again appeals to the paradigm of individual, market-based choice. It’s simply a choice, in her framework, whether to enroll one’s children into a private, charter, or public school. In an interview to promote the book, writer Gail Cornwall asked Oster how justice considerations fit into her framework for decisionmaking—for example, whether it’s fair to send children to well-resourced private schools when integration into a public school system may yield substantial societal benefits. Cornwall corrected Oster’s rejoinder that there is no research on the effects of school integration by pointing to a largebody of research that, in fact, identifies considerable benefits.
Oster responded by invoking the language of econometrics. “Your delta on that is small,” she says—claiming, in other words, that the decision of any lone (white and affluent) family choosing to matriculate their child in a less-resourced public school will be of negligible effect. The implication is that they should be allowed to defer to individual choice, as if individual choices are immaterial to the surrounding community. Yet while the individualism central to this style of reasoning prevents Oster from even acknowledging the concept of a collective benefit, the parents in her books’ white, liberal target demographics have no difficulty engaging in collective action—for example, when they organize political campaigns against policies that would racially integrate schools.
Oster is far from the only person to apply an economic style of reasoning to the U.S. education sector. There exists an entire ecosystem of “education reform” organizations that have spent decades attempting to subject schools to market conditions, promoting “school choice”, (i.e., charter schools, some of which are for-profit). This necessitates, among other stances, taking a harder line against organized labor. When the pandemic arrived, billionaires and right-wing interests invested in neoliberal “education reform” saw an opportunity to advance their interests: breaking unions, promoting charter schools, and undermining public education. Oster’s preference for individualism, the rhetoric of choice, and economic reasoning over structural and collective justice-based conceptions made her—as an impeccably credentialed and high-profile economist prior to the pandemic—a valuable “expert” ally in their crusade to reshape U.S. education. Indeed, when the pandemic began, these groups promptly expressed interest in funding her work on COVID in schools.
Oster’s pandemic-era work on schools is a natural extension of her larger intellectual project. Even before the appearance of her billionaire benefactors, very early in the pandemic, Oster was publishing op-eds inThe Washington Post andThe New York Times downplaying the risks of COVID to children, in school settings and in general. She began with a May 2020 piece in the Post (“Opening schools might be safer than you think”), in which she argued that the benefits of in-person instruction are high, while the costs—based on a small number of preliminary studies of coronavirus transmission in schools—are low. In another op-ed in August 2020, Oster proposed the creation of a data dashboard to track information on how K-12 schools nationwide were responding to the pandemic. Oster argued that not only would this system gather vital data that was not being collected by the federal government, but also that this data-driven approach to assessing risk would allay parents’ and teachers’ irrational, anecdote-based fears of in-person instruction during the pandemic.
A month later, in September 2020, Oster launched the National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, with funding support from several right-wing and “education reform” organizations. Oster has claimed that the funders exert no influence on the data collection process or on any of the research on which it’s based, and there is no reason to doubt her claim. However, the eagerness of these groups to support the Dashboard—and Oster’s willingness to accept their money—is a telling indicator of the incentives at play, and the connections that Oster has forged with right-wing ideological projects. Accepting this funding also forced Oster to navigate dual roles: as both a social scientist, putatively committed to rigorous data analysis, and as a well-connected advocate, committed to a particular set of policy preferences.
Oster threaded this needle in an interview with *Bloomberg News* in October 2020. Asked about the potential for adverse consequences of school reopening, she answered, “If the result of having done that is that the policy direction I pushed was not right, at least I got the data to show that.” In other words: she could still serve a useful role as a purveyor of data even if her advocacy against COVID precautions in schools proved incorrect—or had harmful consequences. However, even in the face of a rapidly expanding evidence base and changing indications in the data, Oster’s arguments have consistently remained aligned with her initial policy preferences. Her preferences happen to mirror those of her donors, who have gone on to employ her research in their advocacy for school reopening and a loosening of viral control measures. (For example, this pro-reopening report from the Walton Family Foundation—a major funder of Oster’s work—draws heavily from several of her analyses.)
This brings us to the cornerstone of the economic style of reasoning: the data. The evangelists for the economic style of reasoning exhort their audience to “follow the data”—the alternative being, it is implied, to capitulate to the irrational demons of fear and anxiety. In this narrative, they are the logical, clear-eyed rationalists; those who advocate attentiveness to the precautionary principle—based on well-founded concerns about their own and other people’s safety—are pejoratively associated with emotional, fallacious reasoning. It is emotional and irrational, for example, to be concerned that a novel pesticide could be a carcinogen, at least until “the data” is in.
Such claims to superior logic and reason can be a convenient mask for ideological assumptions. Appeals to “following the data” do not always reflect a scientific consensus; rather, “the data” is a rhetorical device used to grant narrative authority to certain quantitative analyses—those that confirm preconceived ideas. Meanwhile, those analyses can (and often do) have important limitations like weak study designs, arbitrary assumptions, or erroneous math that should alert readers to interpret the findings cautiously. The intent is to shame people for straying from the experts’ superior rationality, and ultimately to portray any demand for change to the status quo as fringe, conspiratorial, and anti-scientific.
The imprimatur of scientific objectivity is often used to substantiate ideological claims, as has been made abundantly clear by the prevalence of other industry-funded or ideologically motivated research—on tobacco, on processed food, on carbon emissions, and on charter schools alike. Normative assumptions and predetermined conclusions can make their way into “scientific” findings with surprising ease. (Consider, for example, the arbitrary values assigned to human life in cost-benefit analyses.) This process of mustering weak evidence to support a previously determined course of action has been called “policy-based evidence making:” the deeply unscientific process of (consciously or unconsciously) massaging data to conform to a preconceived conclusion.
Oster’s work on COVID and schools is rife with examples of policy-based evidence making. In one early instance, Oster relied on alarmingly low-quality, incomplete data from the School COVID-19 Response Dashboard to confidently declare that schools were low-risk environments for viral spread. In an October 2020 article in The Atlantic,“Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” Oster assured readers in no uncertain terms that COVID transmission simply did not occur in schools at a rate that would necessitate closures.
But the analysis underlying the piece drew on a sample of miniscule size—a mere two weeks of school data, reported in the second half of September 2020. (The sample was also biased by the fact that it was collected only from schools voluntarily participating in the Dashboard.) The second half of September 2020 coincided with the very beginning of a national uptick in cases that would eventually become the punishing surge of winter 2020-21—making estimates from this limited timeframe a poor approximation of the risk for the entire semester or year. More importantly, at the time of the op-ed, the Dashboard displayed zero COVID cases in a large majority of schools, giving the appearance that there was no correlation between case rates in schools and their surrounding communities. This scenario—a data set full of missing and zero values—is highly implausible for “real world” data collection.
The apparent low quality of these data raised important questions about the quality of the schools’ data collection and case reporting procedures. These issues should have also raised red flags about the bold and consequential claims Oster made based on the data. But that didn’t happen. Instead, it became an article of faith that the laws of physics governing viral transmission don’t apply to schools, even as evidence of in-school viral transmission has mounted throughout the pandemic.
Oster’s signature style is approaching research claims with skepticism. Yet she failed to state the critical limitations of her data in her Atlantic op-ed—except the limitations that biased the analyses in ways that reinforced her policy preferences. (For example, she is careful to note that a positive case reported to a school district may have been picked up elsewhere, not in school.) Months later, the Dashboard team would implicitly acknowledge these data quality issues, pointing out that in some jurisdictions (initially, Texas and New York, with several states added in later), state governments coordinated data collection, resulting in more consistent case reporting. However, Oster’s bold—and broadly influential—claim had already been made.
[GRF]
Data from the National School COVID-19 Dashboard on October 10th, 2020 showed a large majority of schools reporting zero confirmed or suspected cases, and no correlation between school and county case rates.*
By the spring of 2021, a nationwide push to end hybrid learning (where about half of students are physically present in the classroom at any given time) and return to full in-person instruction for all students was underway. This effort had begun even before vaccines were available to most education workers, or any children. As more schools began contemplating bringing students back for in-person classes with varying levels of COVID precautions in place, a new challenge emerged. Many schools didn’t have the square footage to accommodate all of their students at once while maintaining six feet of distance between them, per CDC guidelines at the time.
Fortunately for proponents of reopening, Oster was ready with a timely intervention. She co-authored a study (with other vocal reopening advocates) investigating whether district-level policies requiring six feet of distance were associated with reduced COVID transmission in schools, compared to schools with policies that allowed just three feet of distance. The study concluded that policies permitting shorter distances were not associated with increased COVID transmission. Subsequently, it was cited by both Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky as an assurance that the return to daily in-person instruction could be made safely. The CDC promptly changed its distancing guidance—for schools only.
In reality, however, the study was far from conclusive. The results found that six-foot distance policies were compatible with anywhere between a 40% decrease and a 34% increase in the COVID case rate for students. It is not appropriate to use findings with such a high degree of imprecision as the basis for any health and safety policy. Oster and her colleagues’ conclusion was based on a common misinterpretation of statistical results that treats an imprecise effect estimate as conclusive evidence of no effect. Moreover, two unaffiliated researchers later identified errors in the Massachusetts school attendance data used in the study. This prompted Oster and her co-authors to issue a correction, in which they acknowledged the data quality issues but maintained that the errors did not change their conclusions.
However, those independent researchers also* found that even the slightest change to an arbitrary threshold used to define whether a school was fully remote on a particular week did indeed change the study results—to show a benefit of greater distancing. It is also noteworthy that the study was accepted and published in the prestigious journal *Clinical Infectious Diseases within 15 days of submission—much shorter than the typical peer review timeline, raising questions about whether it was appropriately scrutinized prior to publication. In contrast, the results of the independent review were not made public until nearly a full year after the study came out. By this time, true to pattern, the study had already influenced policy so profoundly that the correction was no longer relevant to important questions about school operations during the pandemic.
Throughout the pandemic, Oster’s advocacy has helped make the “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instruction in favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. The direction of her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal publichealthmeasures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices that can be decided through cost-benefit calculations.
Oster, however, says she has been reluctant to loudly promote this vision, due to fears of public backlash. Contemplating an end to mask mandates, Oster resolved to her Twitter audience, “I will admit I have been reluctant to talk about this, in part due to fear of being yelled at. This wasn’t brave. I will try to be braver.” On vaccines (which she has rarely discussed, after one particular comment she made in March 2021 provoked considerable criticism), she told the Walton Family Foundation, “It is a very, very different cost benefit analysis for vaccination of a four-year-old than it is for an 85-year-old… I think we’re going to have to accept that vaccination rates in little kids are going to be lower than vaccination rates in adults, and that’s probably okay from the standpoint of the virus.”
The markedly reduced severity of COVID infection in young children relative to older adults does not mean that vaccination should be optional or just one particularly cautious choice, among many, that parents can make. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends vaccinating all eligible children (five and up) against COVID-19. When a vaccine for children under five is approved by the FDA, the AAP will likely issue the same recommendation for very young children. Oster is not casting doubt on the vaccines outright—just on their usefulness for children.
Sociologist Jessica Calarco has argued, based on qualitative interviews with mothers of young children, that messages from health authorities and media (including Oster) about the relative mildness of COVID-19 have contributed to the development of a “moral calm” around children and COVID infection—suggesting one reason for stagnating childhood vaccination is the pervasiveness and credibility of the message that COVID is not dangerous for children. This message is not evidence-based: we now know that COVID can cause substantial harm to children. The more infections we permit, the higher the absolute numbers of these bad outcomes. As of mid-March 2022, 1,341 children under 18 had died of COVID in the U.S. The rarity of severe outcomes for children is not an argument to abandon the precautionary principle, or mitigation policies to protect children.
Emily Oster responds to a question about vaccinating children on Turn the Page Project, a Walton Family Foundation website launched in June 2021.*
Temporarily closing school buildings—quintessential high-risk indoor environments—was a straightforward application of the precautionary principle, especially in the early days of the pandemic, when information about COVID risks and mitigation practices was scarce and provisional. Despite the fact that closures were indeed supremely disruptive to children, parents, and communities, polling data across both years of the pandemic shows consistently high levels of support among parents for public health measures, including mask mandates. During times of high spread, like the January 2022 Omicron wave, parents also supported temporary closures or shifts to hybrid instruction modes.
But the demographic that is least supportive of public health measures in schools—higher-income and predominantly white parents—overlaps with Oster’s readership. This is likely informed by various factors, including that wealthier schools have more resources and can better limit spread through measures like ventilation upgrades and asymptomatic surveillance testing. The difficulty of performing white-collar jobs from home with children present may have also been an influence. Parents, particularly mothers, needed in-person instruction to continue so that they could work effectively at home; many also likely felt intense pressure to keep their children progressing through a sequence of assessments and benchmarks to remain competitive for college. It also bears repeating that not everyone has experienced the same pandemic. White people, particularly affluent white people, face an objectively lower disease risk. Children of color have been far more likely to experience severe illness or lose a parent to COVID, mirroring nationwide racial and ethnic disparities in COVID impact.
The bitter struggle over COVID in schools, conducted with the rhetoric of “choice,” opened up space for an alliance between affluent white liberal parents and a right-wing propaganda infrastructure devoted to destroying unions and public schools. For instance, John Arnold, the former Enron executive behind the eponymous Arnold Ventures (which funds Oster), has used the pandemic to attack teacher’s unions and further his goal of dismantling public pension funding, much of which is allocated to unionized public school teachers. The pandemic also provided an opportunity to increase charter school usage at the expense of public school enrollment. It gave plutocrats like the Waltons yet another chance to attack teachers’ unions by painting their demands for safer working conditions as irrational. By advocating reopening in VID](another Walton grantee) during a period when the Chicago Teachers Union was campaigning for stronger COVID rules, Oster helped the Waltons do precisely that.
Under the Trump and Biden administrations alike, the architects of the U.S. pandemic response have failed all parents and children. (To say nothing of society at large.) They failed to prioritize closing non-essential businesses to make it safer to open schools, and they failed to provide schools with resources to ensure a minimum level of public health measures. Interestingly, neither Oster nor the inchoate “school reopener” movement that coalesced around her work ever called on the federal government to ensure a higher level of safety by, say, appropriating more money for universal in-school testing.
Nowadays, school reopening advocates repeatedly insist their conclusions have been vindicated, writing articles with titles like “We Opened Schools and… It was Fine” in The Atlantic. Their declarations of victory ignore a growing body of research that has found schools contribute substantially to community coronavirus transmission, especially in the absence of adequate mitigation. Child vaccination rates also remain abysmally low, with just over a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 fully vaccinated. More than 7,000 people have died of COVID in the U.S. every single week since September 2021: the tragic but predictable outcome of adherence to the warped logic of individual choice in a crisis that is, fundamentally, collective.
As of this writing, what remained of public health measures has largely been abandoned in the wake of the White House’s rhetorical pivot to a “new normal” (and their failure to secure additional COVID funding). Residual fights over masking and vaccine mandates persist; Emily Oster continues to apply her individualized cost-benefit analysis framework to express skepticism of both. COVID is still flourishing, and new variants threaten future surges. Yet the pro-charter and anti-union corporate interests with which Oster and her work are aligned have reason to rejoice. They have succeeded in marshaling data and deeply ingrained cultural attachments to individual choice in service of deregulatory ideology, to everyone’s detriment. They have succeeded in exploiting the politics of schools and education to challenge unions and other impediments to profit. And, along with the rest of the ownership class, they have largely succeeded in normalizing mass death, foreclosing better futures.
Schools, as important sites of social reproduction, a safety net for children and parents, and public institutions with organized workforces, proved to be the perfect laboratory for experimenting with pushback on COVID mitigations. Just as crucially, they have been a site of the development of a rhetoric around COVID, which has been deployed to justify the cavalier abandonment of public health measures. When schools dropped masking requirements, supporters appealed to the concept of parents’ *choice.*But individual choice is a disastrously inadequate framework for addressing collective problems like a respiratory virus. Allowing some people the “choice” to reject COVID safety measures precludes the safety and well-being of others.
Placing a premium on “individual choice” as a lens for making decisions in an intrinsically interlinked social world is limited at best, and often utterly nonsensical. It ought to be self-evident that our choices affect other people, especially when it comes to airborne viral transmission. Yet the paradigm of individual choice pervades social life in the U.S.—in the fields of reproductive and educational politics, and many others besides. “Choice” in the abstract is made to stand in for justice and fairness, and to substitute for the material resources that would make the capacity for choice meaningful. Choice, however illusory, also preempts critique—if one was offered a choice, what could their grievance possibly be?
Our grievance is that the choice between severely constrained, suboptimal alternatives is an impoverished basis for a philosophy of freedom, including individual freedom. As we have seen time and time again during the pandemic, fierce fights over these lesser alternatives have all but displaced public debate over the broader contours of the pandemic response. Having given up on slowing transmission, the debates now circle around how to live some kind of modicum of “normal” life amidst rates of mass illness and death that are unprecedented in modern times.
Emily Oster’s pitch is that she’s offering relief: relief to parents, to moms much like her. The pandemic has revealed how useful Oster’s way of thinking, expert pedigree, broad popularity, and media access have been to profit-seeking interests. It has also underscored how the “choice” that she justifies is really the “choice” to cast off obligations to others: the permission she offers affluent parents to disengage from the social contract. While the privileged seek a return to normalcy—or some sicker, poorer approximation of it—COVID will continue to infect and kill the working class and people of color at disproportionate rates.
Our failed pandemic response, which has resulted in a million deaths so far, has been predicated on the total replacement of shared moral or ethical values with individualistic assumptions about risks, benefits, and value. The realities of an infectious disease outbreak have proven deeply inconvenient for the privileged, the interests of capital, and the right-wing ideologues who work to justify those hierarchies. The rest of us must look to collective action and solidarity as the essential preconditions for meeting social needs, confronting planetary crises, and working towards a world that does not sacrifice the social good on the altar of self-interest.
Abigail Cartus, Ph.D, MPH is an epidemiologist at Brown University. She focuses on perinatal health and overdose prevention in her work at The People, Place & Health Collective, a Brown School of Public Health research laboratory. Justin Feldman, Ph.D, MPH is an epidemiologist and a Health and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.
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