She was nicknamed the ‘empty oyster’ by her former colleague, Jim Heckman (Nobel Prize winner in economics) for a reason.
Its that because her tough shell and light weight allowed her to bounce off his car without harm in the faculty parking lot?
Emily Oster, comment?
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Emily “I want to drink while pregnant so I’ll write some biased bs to support my priors” Oster
Do you have any evidence her reading of the lit is biased? Have you even read what she says about it?
The scientific literature does not support her claims. I have read it. Perhaps all the super smart economists posting here should too.
Pls cite one good study that shows that <4 drinks a week, no more than one drink a day, does any harm on any metric
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Oh lord, not this again...
I don't care about Oyster's book. I DO care about naggying busy-bodies telling me what to do, with their scolding demeanors, who clearly haven't read the original studies. READ THE STUDIES. There are NONE that find evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome from having an occasional beer.
Seriously. If this was the 1600s, you'd be leading the charge against the witches.
Why don't you busy-bodies write big long posts on the dangers of eating sugar? It's far worse, with actual science backing it up.
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Another new parent here. Wife and I are both economists, and we agree about the low quality of the pregnancy and child development related literature.
Personally, being a parent drove me several times to read medical literature on one issue or another we were facing during pregnancy. I found the quality of these studies to be shockingly low. The empirics are flawed (small sample sizes, selected samples, omitted variables, serious survey biases like recall), there are no robustness checks, the summary statistics are of limited usefulness or aren't presented at all, and on and on. (I found myself really appreciating the length of econ papers.) I'd be happy to give a couple of specific examples if you are interested. I suspect most here are just trolls looking to get some punches in on their favorite EJMR villain.
Recommendations need to be made to parents, so the flimsy studies must be relied upon and extrapolated from. Remember that doctors do not necessarily read the studies, but rather follow the cookbook they find in their medical texts. Also, part of the issue is that most parents couldn't handle being presented any nuance or handle any uncertainty behind the recommendations.
In the end, I don't really believe any of the recommendations, and I now feel like I need to read the literature myself. Of course this is suboptimal, as I am not a medical expert. I appreciated that Emily did some of the legwork for me in the book. -
Oh lord, not this again...
I don't care about Oyster's book. I DO care about naggying busy-bodies telling me what to do, with their scolding demeanors, who clearly haven't read the original studies. READ THE STUDIES. There are NONE that find evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome from having an occasional beer.
Seriously. If this was the 1600s, you'd be leading the charge against the witches.
Why don't you busy-bodies write big long posts on the dangers of eating sugar? It's far worse, with actual science backing it up.So you agree that alcohol can damage the fetus in large amounts, and there is no definitive evidence that it causes damage in moderate amounts. Suggesting that it might be prudent to completely avoid a substance that is known to be toxic in large amounts is comparable to believing in witchcraft. Maybe this makes sense if you have a massive emotional investment in justifying your prior choices?
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the obsession of *absolutely not drinking* during pregnancy (and the crazy social stigma associated with it) is such an American thing. There no such norm in Europe, where most people think it is ok to have the occasional glass of wine or a light beer, clearly with extreme moderation and good judgement. More than a bit of alcohol, American mothers should worry about the poisonous food they ingest every f**ing day.
The rate of fetal alcohol syndrome in Europe is over twice that of the rate in the US.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(17)30021-9/fulltext
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I am a theorist who once worked with a someone on bid-ask spreads, my first empirical paper. The results were interesting and I asked him whether I can look at the raw data, I wanted to learn something. No problem. It turned out that the average bid-ask spreads were negative for a few weeks. Given that they cannot be negative in a second I asked him what that is. "These are bad data". So how can you work with them? "We erase the weeks with negative spreads", something that was not clearly mentioned in the paper. This was the point when I stopped trusting empirical research. (The same goes with medicine papers.)
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In Germany, Switzerland and Greece (probably elsewhere too, I just happen to know about these) the standard advice from gynecologists is a glass of wine or half a beer every now and then is ok. Not sure how this is empirically backed but that's the advice anyway. Can't help but think that societal attitudes towards alcohol shape a lot of the debate.
Not true.