Emily
Oster

Oster is not a parenting guru. She will tell you this directly. She does not tell parents what to do. She does not position herself as having solved the mystery of raising children. What she does is give parents a framework for making decisions - the same framework economists use, adapted for the messy reality of family life where the variables include your own sleep deprivation and your mother-in-law's opinions.

Her self-described approach: "You could be a co-sleeping formula feeder. You don't have to be a 'kind' of parent." This is more radical than it sounds in a parenting culture organized around tribal affiliations (attachment parenting vs. Ferber, breastfeeding vs. formula, organic vs. conventional). Oster's implicit argument is that most of these debates are fake - that the data doesn't support the strong version of almost any of these positions, and that parents should stop feeling guilty about decisions that have minimal measurable impact on their children.

She is, according to people who know her and interviews she's given, genuinely not very guiltable. She doesn't wrestle with the mom guilt that defines so much of the parenting conversation. This is partly a personality trait and partly the inevitable result of having spent years reading the actual research - which reliably fails to support the doom-laden predictions made about ordinary parenting decisions.

Her academic work at Brown spans health economics and development economics - the same tools she uses in her books, applied to larger policy questions. She is affiliated with Brown's Policy Lab and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. None of this is ornamental. She is an active researcher who also writes books for a general audience, which is genuinely unusual.

She comes from a family that is, statistically speaking, absurdly accomplished. Both her parents - Sharon Oster and Ray Fair - are professors of economics at Yale. Her husband, Jesse Shapiro, is a professor of economics at Brown University. Their household is probably the densest concentration of regression analysis in Rhode Island.

The family origin story that gets cited most: at age two, her parents placed a tape recorder in her crib to study her language development. They discovered she used more complex sentences when talking to herself than when speaking to adults. She was included in "Narratives from the Crib," a 1989 collection of academic papers. It is possible she is the only person currently with over a million books sold who was also a research subject before she could read.

At ages ten and eleven, her father taught her regression programming, which she found genuinely entertaining. By young adulthood, she was spending hours studying historical records to understand why a local canal had been converted into a railroad. The pattern - find a question, find the data, interrogate it - has held for her entire career.

She ran her first marathon and qualified for Boston on that single attempt. This is not something most people do. The acceptance rate for Boston qualification requires running a marathon considerably faster than the median. She did it the first time she tried the distance. The same approach, essentially, that she applies to everything: set a goal defined by evidence, execute with rigor, don't make it more mystical than it needs to be.

She is described by those who work with her as warm - not the robotic data-cruncher the "evidence-based" brand might suggest. Her writing has always included personal anecdotes alongside the statistics. She makes fun of her own pregnancy experiences. She writes about the gap between what she knew intellectually and how she actually felt. The data and the human experience coexist in her work, which is most of why it reaches so many people who would normally be allergic to terms like "regression analysis."