Could well be good, but The Nation is almost a constant clownshow now so I'm reluctant to read through.
Oh jesus, it's not a publication that I ever pay much attention to, but that's dismal.
3: I'm not sure if it's a malformed link or something the site is doing, but that takes me to the very bottom of the thread (the comment box) so I can't tell which of your comments you're linking to.
I haven't read the link in the OP, but let me take this opportunity to highly recommend the podcast If Books Could Kill. They do excellent, funny, and research-based takedowns of many terrible airport books.
They haven't done Oster yet but she's exactly the kind they tackle. Dumb contrarians that are disturbingly influential.
Although Oster is a bit of a special case, because she did publish some reasonably OK stuff before she went off the deep end over Covid, IIRC.
I really like Oster's first book as a corrective to the breathless pregnancy guides that can be summed up as for all x, if you did x, you could have caused a miscarriage. The article here makes the same mistake. Oster's book helped me talk my sister off the ledge over worrying about whether having a glass of wine before she knew she was pregnant meant she'd damaged the baby (who is now 10 and academically the boy with all the gifts.)
As to the new book, which I haven't read, Oster's mom telling her that she doesn't go grocery shopping because of the opportunity cost is a totally normal nerdy academic thing to do, and the author paints it as some sort of dereliction of duty. What a horrible thing to tell a child that buying them food isn't worthwhile, etc, but....probably not going shopping gave her more time with the kid soooooo. Economists are weird parents! But I bet there's a market for talking about efficiency for overworked umc moms!
OK, the review is interesting. This part seems a little too pat a takedown though:
Not everyone agreed. In a 2022 essay on Oster in The New York Review of Books, Ginia Bellafante cited research by Susan Hemingway, the director of Washington State's Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Diagnostic and Prevention Network, showing that there is simply no way to know how any amount of alcohol will affect a developing fetus. Hemingway's research on twins exposed to alcohol in utero found that two siblings exposed to the same amount via their mother's drinking could have divergent reactions, because differences in their genetic makeup could make them either more or less vulnerable to its effects. Since a pregnant woman cannot predict how the fetus she is carrying will respond to alcohol exposure, Hemingway concluded that it was simply safest to abstain--just as the US surgeon general has advised for decades.
Not sure why a single paper is a slamdunk against a conclusion. There have been a ton of epidemiological and other studies about alcohol and pregnancy. Surely the task is to integrate their findings.
I didn't know she went off the deep end over Covid!
6: The first book came out after I'd already navigated pregnancy, so I never actually read it, but I agree that there was a huge vacuum in the market for a book that treated pregnant women like adults.
I don't remember quite how far - I don't think she got into ivermectin - but I think she was in that group of people that decided closing the schools for more than six months (or whatever) was history's greatest crime and never got off it.
Also:
The Family Firm was, in essence, a guidebook for maximizing a child's human capital in a world in which, in the United States at least, the state no longer provides the basics of a dignified life--the childcare, healthcare, social security, and lower and higher education that should be available to every child and every parent. Against this backdrop, gaming the system to give your child a competitive advantage becomes an imperative, one that dovetails all too easily with parental instincts. But gaming a broken system... does nothing to address the social, economic, and political problems that create a broken system in the first place.
Almost like it's an advice book for people wanting advice for them individually?
Not sure this fault is particularly new or different from the faults of the existing parenting genre.
7: right. "There is no known safe amount" is true. But that's not the same as "no amount is safe."
I misstated the author's concern. By telling your kid you think your time is too valuable to waste on grocery shopping, you're telling them that other people who gets your groceries are worthless. I don't see how this follows, but maybe the author doesn't live in a place where we exchange money for food and services and explain things to small children in ways that journalists can understand.
The Calabat is ridiculously pleased with himself because he can replace the car's air filters, which he has been told would cost $300 at the mechanic. He admires my econ prof friends, but he's also the kid of a philosopher, so he winds up arguing that we should compensate him because he saved us money.
12: Oh god, that passage gave me massive deja vu of a big argument here circa maybe 2006? Argh, Pauline Kael maybe? Something about teaching your daughters to do something careerwise for the good of the whole instead of the good of the individual? I can't remember the details.
Pauline Keel changed my air filter.
Linda Hirshmann. I was wildly annoying and annoyed.
Also, woohoo Calabat! Competent, useful children are the best!
I think there is some buried point that advice centered on how the nuclear parents can arrange their own lives to optimize their own kids' life chances is limiting by not emphasizing what people can do together across the family line, making friends, building social supports, being involved in causes, etc. But I don't think it's as much of a fault as the reviewer does that the book is insufficiently angry / not prescribing political action for tough circumstances.
This is so cheesy of me, but I was moved by the Tyler Perry line at the Harris rally in Georgia where he said, "It was so important for me to stand with a candidate who understands that we, as America, we are a quilt. And I could never stand with a candidate who wants us to be a sheet."
Aside from the pithy sheet bit, I think of it as the value of a diverse community that has to solve problems via coordination and cooperation. This is building on comment 18, for the record.
16: ha.
What exactly was the crux of the argument? Do I just need to RTFA?
Hard to summarize because all the rancor came down to how fairly or unfairly the argument was being summarized. In extremely broad strokes, Hirshmann thought that people generally, including women, lead the most flourishing lives when they can do the sort of work that is generally paid: non-domestic work. And so to lead flourishing lives, women should make decisions so as to facilitate doing that kind of work. These decisions include not having too many kids (did she say stop at one, maybe?); make professional decisions based on getting paid to increase your level of personal autonomy over future decisions; and marry "down" so as not to have your career subordinated to your husband's.
I'm remembering now. The part that stuck with me was something about raising your daughters with a more single-minded career focus than has been done in the past, like maybe instilling ruthlessness in them over a desire for a family? Or which careers to pick? Idk.
Probably we just needed better analogies.
17: it is exceedingly cute how pleased he is. Shiv has tried to teach Pebbles but her attitude is definitely that she can outsource work to her brother so it's more of a struggle to get her to care.
Ocean Waves is not great but is an interesting anthropological object.
A lot of people in global health dislike her, because she argued that sending antiviral drugs to HIV patients in Africa didn't make economic sense.
I always had the sense that her Covid stuff, downplaying the risks to kids, and saying it didn't matter if they git vaccinated was less pro kid and mote pro business. Very young children have benefited from vaccines quite a bit though obviously not as much as the very old. Her data on school safety was criticized by researchers who found that masks did help among school children in Boston. She was also not interested in things like improving ventilation in schools.
Much of her funding for her Covid research came from anti-union groups like the Walton foundation.
6.2 Apropos optimizing grocery shopping... It's important to keep in mind that "the past is a different country". This happened about 4 decades ago. It was early on in the changing of sex/gender roles, and a much less fair time for women not only generally, but especially in the workplace. Oster's mother was then a tenure track professor at Yale, ended up as dean of the mgmt school, and Oster has a couple of siblings. Given what we know about the economists and their general nerdiness, certainly male ones, it does not seem likely that her father took a lead role in the home. The only way that Oster's mother was going to keep all the balls in the air was by figuring out where to optimize cut corners. All that's weird is the way the mother explained it to the daughter.
To get an idea of how weird things were back then, consider this 1970 article from the NYT.
Links here in case I messed them up above:
Economists maximize utility when their results align with funder priorities.
about the economists and their general nerdiness
From 29:
A gift was always one of the highlights of the Executive, and was one reason why the cost of the flight was $67 --or $3 above the normal firstâclass fare. Wednesday, there were two gifts: a glass ash tray with an airplane drawing on it, and cufflinks with a real watch in one of them.As the men filed out, they kissed all four stewardesses on the cheek.
How come the stewardesses had the same cheek?
And from the other link:
Professor Oster argued, for example, that one reason employers denied women and members of minorities promotions was to keep their profile low so that they wouldn't be poached by competitors eager to diversify their ranks.
Um.
Also from 29 last: "telling jokes as though they were at a cock tail party."
Inadvertent, but
A lot of people in global health dislike her, because she argued that sending antiviral drugs to HIV patients in Africa didn't make economic sense.
I always had the sense that her Covid stuff, downplaying the risks to kids, and saying it didn't matter if they git vaccinated was less pro kid and mote pro business. Very young children have benefited from vaccines quite a bit though obviously not as much as the very old. Her data on school safety was criticized by researchers who found that masks did help among school children in Boston. She was also not interested in things like improving ventilation in schools.
Much of her funding for her Covid research came from anti-union groups like the Walton foundation.
Economists maximize utility when their results align with funder priorities.
Just in case, is Andie MacDowell here?
Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today.
I'm disappointed at how little presence the "flapjacks and flounders" joke as in search engine results.
Ponyo is a tour de force animation wise, but I had trouble not noticing that they definitely killed like 3 billion people.
I enjoyed Expecting Better but as an academic in a field where economists like to wade in on occasion, I sympathize with actual medical researchers who hate it. I liked it because she spoke to me like an adult and her results confirmed my priors, but I respect people who argue she cherry picked studies to confirm what she wanted to find.
As someone who at different times in my life has been poor and pregnant, one thing that struck me is how in both instances you are very obviously treated like a public health statistic. As a poor person it was made abundantly clear that I was being treated as a public health issue, not an individual. My health mattered only insofar as long term it was better for society for people in aggregate to be healthy. My individual health didn't matter in treatment, nor did doctors make any attempt to value my own thoughts or desires as a patient. (I also was treated much better than the average poor person because it was obvious I was a grad student.) The only time I felt even remotely that way with private health insurance was during pregnancy. It wasn't all the time and I did have very good providers but there was a general sense that my own person was incidental and I certainly had providers who treated me like an idiot vessel. I had one resident in particular who blew off my questions about an early term birth at 37 weeks and referred to the baby as "in my tummy."
If you're wealthy enough to never be on medicaid or need to use the public health clinic the only time as a woman you might experience that sort of direct condescension is while pregnant and it is very off-putting.
If you're wealthy enough to never be on medicaid or need to use the public health clinic the only time as a woman you might experience that sort of direct condescension is while pregnant
Not disagreeing with anything else you've written, but on this: hoo boy, wait till you reach 75 and literally everyone in the health and social care industry starts addressing you as though you were a dribbling idiot.
Seriously, enjoy the sensation of people speaking to you without raising their voice an octave and cooing as though they were addressing a labrador puppy, because it is more temporary than you might think.
No one started doing that to my dad until he was literally dying when he was past 80.
47 and 48: The poet Donald Hall talked about that. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/08/146348759/donald-hall-a-poets-view-out-the-window
I've often wondered whether Assisted Living couldn't be made more acceptable to people if it were made to feel less infantilizing, and more like being in a nice hotel.
|| The NYT dares to ask the big question of our time.
Wait, does your whole body need deodorant?
Belatedly, Barry Season 3 is legit great.