Economist Emily Oster of Brown University has become the go-to expert on the risks that children might get COVID. She has written widely in the popular press and been quoted extensively by others about the low risk of reopening schools. Oster is an economist, not a public health expert.
Writing in The American Prospect, journalist Rachel Cohen quotes many public health experts who disagree with Oster. She writes that Oster’s datasets are incomplete and flawed. There is more uncertainty about the risks to children than Oster reports, she writes.
But she concludes by giving Oster credit:
Oster, unlike others and to her credit, does acknowledge that some people will get sick and even die if schools reopen. In addition to emphasizing the social, emotional, and academic harms students face by missing in-person school, Oster says we accept mortality risks in normal times, like allowing people to drive cars, have swimming pools, and avoid the flu shot. “There will be some in-school transmission, no matter how careful we are,” she wrote in July. “This is the unfortunate reality. Some of these people may get very sick. If we are not willing to accept this, we cannot open schools.”
Oddly, Cohen didn’t reach out to Oster for comment. Very strange given that the entire piece was a critique of Oster’s analysis.
“Twenty states in her tracker had zero traditional public schools reporting; Nevada and South Carolina had one; Texas and North Dakota had two; Connecticut and Oklahoma had four.Twenty states in her tracker had zero traditional public schools reporting; Nevada and South Carolina had one; Texas and North Dakota had two; Connecticut and Oklahoma had four.
The resulting concentration of private schools, coupled with the dearth of public schools, makes it especially difficult to draw inferences, especially for less-resourced areas and communities with high concentrations of Black and brown students. This work-in-progress dataset wouldn’t be such a concern if Oster wasn’t disseminating broad conclusions based upon it. In a Wall Street Journal article published last week on school reopenings, Oster told the reporter that her data “suggests the risks to kids from going to school are small.”
Oster didn’t ask Cohen to comment before she made such sweeping conclusions to the WSJ because her main motive was promoting herself, not the truth. There is a way to exaggerate conclusions in a misleading way to get some personal gain for yourself (like Eva Moskowitz) and there is a way to present conclusions with context because your REAL goal is the truth, not your own career.
Cohen gave Oster credit for some points she made. But the fact that Oster was more interested in getting publicity and saying the things that would give her publicity is revealing. Those people aren’t real scholars, they are political hacks.
I compare this with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, one of the 3 people promoting herd immunity in the Great Barrington Declaration and letting a million Americans die, overwhelming hospitals, in service to the economy. Dr. Bhattacharya also promoted early, unchecked and misleading findings in his “antibody study” in Santa Clara County in northern California because his main interest was himself and not in science. It turned out his own wife was recruiting her friends from her upscale community to help his study, which is a huge no no in scientific research. But like others who believe publicly destroying a young child or a good reporter is a small price to pay when they are caught doing something wrong, Dr. Bhattacharya kept repeating the lie that a reporter “went after his family” (without giving any details that she simply reported a true fact about something his wife did) — it was clearly an attempt to hurt her because people like that prefer to hurt others than to ever have any of their wrongdoings questioned.
This is a tale of two people — one, Cohen, cares about science, epidemiology, and the truth. The other cares about her career but claims that her exaggerations and misleading use of studies that just happen to promote her career are really because she “cares about kids”. People who care about kids — like Diane Ravitch – are interested in evidence, not interested in shaping evidence to prove whatever gets the WSJ to give them publicity. If Diane Ravitch makes an error, she corrects it, because she is interested in the truth. I have yet to see Oster correct her heavy reliance on misleading studies, but perhaps she will prove to be something other than the hack she seems to be. Will she admit there are still a lot of unknowns and there isn’t anywhere near enough evidence to make the sweeping conclusions she makes? Or will she do what most hacks do and demonize Cohen and anyone who criticizes her instead of addressing their criticism?
I don’t quite follow your comment.
Oster works at Brown University, so I am sure she has plenty of high paid lawyers on her side to ensure that no one says anything mean about her.
If they come after me, I will tell them where they can put their suits (and it won’t be the drycleaners, although they might need that afterward)
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
FLERP!,
My comment is that Cohen’s piece cited what Emily Oster (who got in trouble earlier in her career by being totally wrong and misusing information) said and explained how Emily Oster was wrong. Why would it be any more “odd” than Emily Oster pro0motinfg her views and writing without consulting any of her critics? Why the double standard?
Did you know that this is not the first time that Emily Oster has promoted her own career using data that people whose goal isn’t ony to promote themselves would have recognized as wrong?
“Part of her dissertation challenged Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s idea that Asia suffered from a 100 million “missing women” problem as a result of gender discrimination and misogyny. Oster posited that almost half the problem could be explained by pregnant women having hepatitis B, which correlated to birthing boys. The Journal of Political Economy, co-edited at the time by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, published it in 2005. Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner lauded it in Slate just as they were rocketing to fame with the release of Freakonomics, a blockbuster that’s been praised for bringing economics to the masses and panned for debasing the discipline with cleverness. The paper raised eyebrows throughout the field: Who did this young woman think she was? In this case, the critics were right. The following year researchers in Taiwan contradicted her findings using a larger data sample. She ended up traveling throughout China to collect better data and correcting herself in a follow-up paper. When the Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on the about-face, she said it was the responsible thing to do. “This is the way science works,” she said.”
That is NOT the way “science works” to most people. You don’t hype limited research as proving something that it doesn’t prove — that is “Trump science” promoting various COVID-19 cures because some random study made them look like miracle cures.
Oster has always lived in a bubble of privilege where the huge mistakes she makes — which would be career enders for anyone without her family connections — don’t affect her going on to the next big career-boosting job. And like those who live in her bubble of privilege, she isn’t worried about overtaxed health care system b ecause she rightly knows she won’t oay the price.
But she is incredibly callous about those who will:
“Oster knows she’ll get blamed if the reopening experiment ends in disaster. In that case, “the best I can do is say that I did something I felt was productive and helpful,” she told me. “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.”
OMG, she knows she and her family will get the same 5 star medical treatment as President Trump, but if hundreds of thousands of far less privileged Americans die, she will still smugly announce that she was “productive and helpful” during the pandemic.
Can you imagine how much privilege she lives in to know that even if she is wrong and 1 million Americans die, she should be praised and lauded for causing people to get more data!
That isn’t science. Scientists don’t hype early data and when it is proven wrong say “but I did good because if I hadn’t hyped data that was totally wrong and caused a million deaths, people would not have gathered more data. I should be praised for my hyping the wrong thing!”
If she cared about data, she would be devoting her time to gathering more data,not devoting her time to misleading people into believing the data gathered so far says something it does not. It’s as absurd as President Trump justifying hyping getting people to inject bleach because it encouraged people to gather more data whether injecting bleach was good or not.
That data can be gathered without someone hyping it.
And if you want to discredit Cohen not on facts, but because she didn’t ask Oster to comment, then you should be discrediting Oster because she has ignored all of her critics comments in every interview and article.
Your questions seems as absurd as critiquing the excellent NYT reporter who wrote the long Sunday Magazine piece about the flawed hydroxychloroquine studies because he didn’t get a comment from President Trump, who hyped those studies to promote his own agenda.
A journalist doesn’t need a comment from people hyping other people’s research incorrectly to promote their own agenda.
By the way, FLERP!
Why don’t you ask Emily Oster why SHE did not reach out for comments from folks like Dr Susan J Hemingway (formerly Astley), professor of Epidemiology and Pediatrics and fetal alcohol expert at U of Washington before Oster published her book on pregnancy.
Very strange given that one entire chapter in Oster’s book was a critique of the analyses of fetal alcohol experts like Hemingway.
Sorry, I didn’t read it.
And the key word there is BEFORE she published her book.
I did not ask whether you had read it, nor whether you HAVE asked her.
I asked you “why don’t you ask her”
See the difference?
I’m sure you do.
You’re a lawyer.
And you can get the necessary information from the link.
It’s irresponsible for economists to assert that they know more than epidemiologists about epidemics or educators about education.
No, I’ve never met or corresponded with Emily Oster.
Oh, brother.
That’s also not what I asked.
I said WHY DON’T YOU
But it was a rhetorical question anyway.
Osterwise
Oster’s head
Is poster sized
As is said
It’s ostrichwise
https://images.app.goo.gl/X22aekNUBS3Q1BTP9
SomeDAM . . .
. . . and in days of old,
so criticized,
is bedded on a pike. CBK
Catherine,
I am sorry if you think I have been “unfair” to poor Emily.
But perhaps you would be so kind as to explain for everyone here how Oster could EVER potentially claim an infection rate “below 0.01%” given that the best covid test has a minimum estimated uncertainty of about 2%.
I look forward to your explanation.
Thanks!
According to Oster “Once we have a dashboard for these data, the media could use these sources to drive their coverage. Even if they chose not to—because ‘Day 45 with infection rate below 0.01 percent’ doesn’t generate a lot of clicks—citizens would be empowered to analyze the relevant information themselves”
I would be curious to know how Oster thinks one could EVER conclude/claim “an infection rate below 0.01 percent” given that the false negative rate of the most accurate covid tests (RT-PCR) is 2% at best (and, as studies have indicated, possibly up to 29%, depending on at what point in the viral infection the test is performed).
Oster’s hypothetical indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that she has no clue how epidemiology works in particular or how science works in general (specifically with regard to uncertainty) .
It would simply not be possible to EVER legitimately CONCLUDE (and claim) an infection rate of even 0.01% from the most accurate covid tests available (RT-PCR), which have a false negative rate that is at best around 2%, a factor of 200 greater!!
While it is possible to have an infection rate that is less than the uncertainty associated with the test (after all, it’s even possible to have zero infections in a tested population), it is most certainly NOT legitimate to CONCLUDE such a thing from test results because “test positives” (or “positivity rate”) simply do not provide a full picture. In fact, they can paint a picture that is FAR from the reality.
The easiest way to see that is to consider two tests, one with a false negative rate of 2% (about the same as the most accurate test for covid: RT-PCR ) and one with a false negative rate of 50% (up to 50% of the negatives can potentially be false — ie infections (which is true for some covid antibody tests)
Suppose one did testing on 1000 people with both tests but did not know which results came from which test.
Further suppose that one test yielded just 2 positives out of the 1000 (a positivity rate of 0.2%) and that the other yielded 20 positives out of the 1000 (positivity rate of 2%).
Are we REALLY supposed to believe that the “0.2% positivity rate” is necessarily the more accurate result? AND that the actual infection rate is necessarily just 0.2% because the positivity rate of one test was? (The 0.2% result might have actually come from the test with the 50% false negative rate — which COULD potentially have misidentified 499 actual positives as negatives in the case where it gave just 2 positives)
Or let’s suppose that both tests gave the very same number of positives. Would it be valid to assume (based on test positives alone) that the two results are equally reliable?
That would be absurd. Stupid, really.
But that is precisely what the folks who posit infection rates and positivity rates like 0.01% and 0.17% , which are not only less than, but FAR less than the uncertainty of the test itself (2% min) indicates.
I’m sorry, but anyone even implying this sort of thing has no business weighing in on school safety.
well said
False Negative Tests for SARS-CoV-2 Infection — Challenges and implications (New England Journal of Medicine)
Steven Woloshin, M.D., Neeraj Patel, B.A., and Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2015897
Economists try to weigh in on everything whether qualified or not. They are not doctors, teachers or experts in infectious diseases, especially a virus we only half understand.
Sounds like the McKinsey management consultants who think they know everything about everything.
Let’s hope the 2020 prediction of Oster’s father (also, an economist) is correct. He predicted Trump’s win in 2016 and predicts Biden in 2020.
I’d have to see the details of Oster’s father’s (who art in Heaven?) “Prediction” to know whether to give them any credence.
It can be like picking out the psychics after the fact who “predicted” the future. The media almost always focus on the ones who got it right (few and far between) and rarely (if ever) on the much larger number who got it wrong.
If father is anything like daughter when it comes to “analysis” , I would certainly not take much stock in his predictions.
By the way, what purpose do such “predictions” serve anyway, other than to sell books for people who have nothing better to do than produce popular tripe for consumption by the masses?
Agree completely, Poet.
The family likes the limelight.
It is obvious that we make decisions that threaten the lives of citizens. What is not so obvious is the process that we go through to decide how, in this instance, we are to make this decision. Have we decided to return to school for the right reasons? Did the president bring in doctors and psychological advisors, having a public discussion? We’re safeguards put into place? Do all classes come with powerful air circulation systems installed for optimum health?
No on all counts, and I have been victim of that myself these past few days.
What?
Oster says we accept mortality risks in normal times, like
–allowing people to drive cars.
Allowing? Not everyone is allowed to drive a car, and not without liability insurance, registration, a driver’s license, seat belts, baby seats if babies are on board, and following the traffic laws posted on roadways, these set by each state. Then there all of the studies of accidents and injuries and constant upgrades in car design to reduce the hazards to your self and to others.
–having or visiting a swimming pool. I doubt that Oster has ever owned property with a swimming pool or attended a public pool. Surely being “allowed” to have swimming pool with no safeguards at all is stupid. Life guards are at swimming pools for many reasons.
Allowing people, including children, to who work in public spaces without flu shots is a trickier matter, because there may be legitimate health issues. In addition, for reasons of faith preventative medication may be prohibited, as is probably true for Christian Scientists.
Being “allowed” to wear or not wear a mask in the midst of a pandemic is Stupid.
Mask wearing is an inexpensive and proven way to mitigate the spread of this potentially lethal virus.
Stop fiddling around with this simple precaution as if requiring it for your own health and the health of others is the end of democracy, and an over-reach of the state, and a reason for armed militias to defend freedom to be mask-less, and a great way to boost the sale of arms.
Laura,
Great comment.
Owners of private pools in most states are required to have a fence at least 4’ high and a childproof lock.
In the meanwhile, doctors and other medical professionals on the front line must isolate from their families to protect them from getting infected, and Dr.Fauci and his family receive death threats.
BTW, as you know and just a reminder that today’s Covid-19 infections are the highest ever.
America is sick and not just from Covid-19.
Thank you, again, Diane.
Whether one agrees with her or not, Oster’s motives, it seems to me, are not in question. In an interview I saw with her a few weeks ago, she said that she is trying to fill a gap that should be covered by federal agencies and resources. She would much rather be a part of a comprehensive national survey and study then out on a limb with her limited staff and resources. She’s quite correct about that. We can argue with her findings and conclusions if we want, that’s fair. But not about her intentions.
I disagree. People who have good motives always make corrections and don’t try to exaggerate findings to make sweeping conclusions that have yet to be proven.
If Oster had good motives, she would not exaggerate findings and allow those exaggerations to be used to shape public policy. In fact, she would loudly speak out and criticize those who use it that way!
If Oster had good motives, she would not give WSJ interviews to misinform readers that the highly limited studies “prove” something that they they do not prove at all.
Imagine that the result of Oster’s promoting herself is to have every large urban city reopen their public schools immediately with students forced to come back. Oster has “proved” it can be done safely and she claims that’s all she is saying and the rest is none of her concern. But she is well-aware that if she said “if all these conditions are met and this money is spent to make schools safe, then schools could re-open” would not get her the publicity she craves so much. Hackery. She doesn’t really care who is harmed because she is promoting “findings” to support something that she knows could not be done without a lot of resources.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. I’m less concerned by a researcher who may have a flawed methodology than I am about federal resources (CDC, HHS, FDA) being misused and muzzled. Oster has no power to implement policy. She is an academic. I don’t agree with her, but neither is she the villain. The administration and Republicans in Congress are.
GregB,
She is no different than the Great Barrington Declaration scientists who are promoting herd immunity.
This isn’t scholarship. It is hype. It is cherry picking things to push a false narrative and playing down all the things that the right wingers that help promote her don’t want played up!
The people promoting re-openings point to these few so-called “experts” to give their ideas credibility, and yes, those so-called “experts” get huge career boosts when they are used that way, which is why they always hype anything that slightly supports what the right wing wants, even if no other legitimate scientist would.
She actually said, if she is wrong, and lots of people end of dying because they believed her hyping of results that had no evidence, at least we should be grateful for her because reopenings will lead to people having a lot more data.
People who get to be wrong over and over again and still hold prestigious jobs. Hmmm… doesn’t that sound just like the economics who are STILL pushing trickle down economics and big tax cuts for rich people?? It doesn’t matter how many times their ideas tanked the economy.
Oster comes right out of that kind of “we can be wrong all we want because we are privileged” academia, while real scholars can’t get jobs. It doesn’t matter to her whether a lot of people die so she justifies the hype that is only good for one person – Oster herself.
In the post above, Diane uses the word that I’ve been using since day one of this pandemic: uncertainty. I stand by that and agree that Oster’s studies do nothing to clear it up. But again, she’s a convenient target. While some pontificate about the faults of her study, they get distracted from the real culprits…the Idiot, his administration–most importantly the Reichsminister Azar–and congressional Republicans. They are just a few of the ones who love the arrows aimed at Oster. It’s less virtual ink aimed at them.
Oster is filling a “gap”, all right.
But I would call it a vacuum, and as the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum.
So the unqualified (and worse) expand like gas to fill that vacuum. You see it with every major disaster (pandemics, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc)
If we had a legitimate federal program to hire qualified epidemiologists to monitor and study viral infections in schools, economists like Emily Oster would never even be considered for the job because they are simply NOT qualified.
She should not have been able to get a job at Brown after her thesis fiasco where she hyped data to claim questionable conclusions that were not true. Which has a similarly to what she is doing now.
That should have been a career-ender, but those born in privilege can make mistake after mistake.
By the way, do you suppose anyone even asked Oster to do what she is doing?
She seems to just insinuate herself into disciplines to weigh in on topics she has no training in.
It’s more than a little like having an economist starting a project to collect and analyze data coming from a particle accelerator they set up in their back yard and then announcing to the NY Times and other science” journals that they had found a new subatomic particle.
Possible?
Well yes.
But probable?
Not very.
Greg-
A program that aired on WBOI (NPR in Northeastern Indiana, 10-26-2020) vindicates everything you’ve written in threads for a different controversial topic.
What occurred is a travesty and, a failure of conscience . And, it is one of media’s greatest omissions leading to devastating consequences the past 4 years.
Found it. Thanks (I think?) for leading me to it. Pretty chilling…not that we didn’t know it already for almost four years. Huelskamp is truly a piece of work. Even the ultra conservative Republicans in western and central Kansas couldn’t stand him and primaries him out. Does not surprise me. His targeted constituency is the most malleably hypocritical slice of the American population around. But there’s Joe and Nancy, you know!
What may be more chilling is the arsenal used by the segment’s self-identified “liberals” to silence criticism.
But, then, the playbook is well worn, as evidenced by its recent use in the most egregious of cases where the most vulnerable were targeted
for abuse.
Economists need to stay in their own lane. They are not epidemiologists and they are not teachers, either. What makes them believe they’re so much smarter than other professionals? Chetty, et al. They ought to stick to their own “dismal science”.
Amen!
The Economist Lane
Economist lane
Is ambulance bane
With shoulder stain
From scattered brain
GregB A gap indeed; but now between her good intentions and what’s both actually the case, and the common and prescribed activities of good government. CBK
Taiwan has had an outstanding response to corona, today marking 200 days without new cases. Their vice president is also a Johns Hopkins trained epidemiologist.
And all we got was a lousy MAGA hat.
Sadly true!
Sometimes my radar for this kind of thing is off, but I’m getting the impression that some commenters here dislike Emily Oster.
That’s completely irrelevant to an assessment of the credibility of her claims.
But I have noticed you have had nothing to say about the latter whenever someone has posted on that.
Why is that FLERP!
Why won’t you address the actual science?
For example, you can start by addressing my question above
https://dianeravitch.net/2020/10/29/rachel-cohen-emily-oster-was-too-optimistic-about-children-and-covid/comment-page-1/#comment-3130845
It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in drawn-out arguments on message boards that waste everyone’s time and change nobody’s minds.
Speaking of “nothing to say about,” I always scan the comments here to see if there is a single commenter from a parent who is drowning from the stress and anguish of school closings. Or a single commenter full-throatedly expressing concern about the same. I’ve never seen it. Not once.
I can’t wait to hear your “defense” of Oster with regard to her “below 0.01 percent” statement .
Ha ha ha.
You seem to have time to post statements that are purposefully provocative, but can’t be bothered to actually address legitimate posts?
Or is it that you just don’t understand the issue well enough to do so?
FLERP!,
“I always scan the comments here to see if there is a single commenter from a parent who is drowning from the stress and anguish of school closings. Or a single commenter full-throatedly expressing concern about the same.”
Wow, I’m shocked you just wrote that.
I have expressed concern about this in quite a few comments. But this isn’t one sided. It is complicated. It takes money and resources.
The irony, of course, is that the Mayor you (and Eva Moskowitz) despise so much actually is one of the people who is concerned about children and their parents if NYC public schools were fully remote. NYC is one of the only large urban areas that tried to provide in-class instruction and it is also the first to do so.
The problem is that looking to privileged white self-promoters like Emily Oster and Eva Moskowitz as saviors always makes things worse, because ultimately the only thing that matters most to them is themselves. (Just like Trump).
They are people who see the world only in terms of how much they benefit and how they can promote dishonest findings to justify doing what (purely coincidentally, they claim) is very, very financially or professionally rewarding to them.
Oster made that clear when she defended hyping going back to school being very safe, despite having no good research to support her claims that the evidence strongly supported reopening schools.
“Oster knows she’ll get blamed if the reopening experiment ends in disaster. In that case, “the best I can do is say that I did something I felt was productive and helpful,” she told me. “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.”
She sounds just like Eva Moskowitz and Donald Trump. They and their defenders justify their lies by acting as if all the harm that was done to other people because of their lies does not really count because those people don’t count when you have no empathy and cannot view life beyond what just happens to be very good for you financially and professionally. You can always point to someone who benefits — like FLERP!’s family — to claim that is why you lied and caused the needless death of many. If you are Oster, you can always pat yourself on the back that you gathered more data as all those people died because of your lie.
But the truth is that the pandemic won’t be solved by lies. No issues in public policy can ever be solved by lies. Lies may result in a public policy where some people benefit, and others are greatly harmed, but those people could benefit without the lies.
Lying is always about helping the people who lie. Despite Trump and Oster’s excuses that some good came out of their lie, that same good could have been achieved by telling the truth. The lie was all about their own self-interest, not a concern for the lives and deaths of other people, even if Oster tries to say she lied for people like FLERP!’s family. If she really cared about FLERP!’s family, she wouldn’t have to lie.
Once we accept the Orwellian premise that good public policy ideas can only be achieved by lying (because people would reject good public policy ideas if they knew the truth?) we have gone down the road of fascism.
Once we believe that the benefit to the few outweighs the harm to the many, our democracy is lost.
“I have expressed concern about this in quite a few comments.”
Could you direct me to any of them? You certainly have nothing to prove to me, and of course I don’t scan every thread. But frankly I’m skeptical.
FLERP!,
I have actually replied to some of your comments expressing sympathy! I will try to find them, but I really have no reason to lie. I never advocated for a complete re-opening of schools, but I have always supported policies that would allow the students who most need and want in-person learning to have that option.
The one thing I did oppose was anyone who tried to make it seem like the answers were simple — and Oster is like them. The amount of resources that are needed to have more students safely return to schools is enormous, but Oster doesn’t really care about that. And it’s impossible to do this perfectly — there will always be glitches along the way.
Lots of people, including de Blasio and Carranza, believe it is possible to re-open schools safely, but the devil is in the details. No one was promoting de Blasio or Carranza as some brilliant truth-teller the way they were promoting Oster, and that is because Oster was providing the right wing propaganda machine with full-on endorsement of their “pandemic is nothing to worry about” lies.
de Blasio was working to reopen schools, not working to push the false narrative that would make the far right adore him and praise him. Oster was all about promoting herself. That meant hyping whatever got her publicity, and if she was wrong, she didn’t care. de blasio did care, which is the difference between being a hack who only cares about her own career, and being a person who cares about real people and how to address their needs.
Oster is no different than those who promoted some miracle cure for COVID using flawed studies. When she is wrong, shje can just say she helped gather more data. But the real question would be why she felt she had to hype those flawed studies in the first place, because many other people do not. Like all the people working to reopen schools who don’t hype false studies so the WSJ publishes them.
Tried responding directly to your comment but I screwed up and it ended up on the bottom of the thread.
FLERP!,
I saw that – I wrote a long reply that seems to have disappeared, so hopefully it will eventually show up.
But in short, you made some good points I agree with. Just think the issue is complicated and people like Oster do a lot more harm than good because they value their career and the benefits of making sweeping conclusions using faulty data far more than they care about finding real solutions that depend on having a truthful discussion.
The bottom line, which I have always believed, is that people pushing false narratives as easy solutions are doing that entirely for their own benefit, not for the children they claim their false narrative is helping. The same children would be helped using a truthful narrative, and the children being harmed by the false narrative would not be harmed anymore! So why would anyone push a false narrative? Because they personally and professionally benefit from that false narrative. That is the only reason. Oster is getting a lot of attention from the “herd immunity” folks because her false narrative helps them, and they help promote Oster.
Sometimes my radar for this kind of thing is off, but I’m getting the impression that FLERP! thinks that we all should “like” a person who hypes flawed studies to promote something that could harm many people.
My opinion- Flerp’s first go-to focus isn’t the greater good.
Secondly, he suspects a person’s rational analysis takes 2nd place to personal experience. And, thirdly, the amount of evidence that it would take to convince him of something he believes is untrue would be excessive.
On the positive side, he doesn’t appear to have a fragile ego requiring pandering and, he doesn’t call in backup when his argument lacks merit.
Linda, LOL, thanks.
Here’s one tweet from a longer thread, posted by Betsy DeVos (or a staffer), in which she cites Oster.
Oster knew her data would be used like this, and that is why she made sweeping statements that could be used to promote the Trump/DeVos agenda. if she had actually reported truthfully, the way Cohen did, she knew her conclusions couldn’t be used by right wing Republicans and she would not have gotten the attention she clearly craved.
Oster had no real data about large urban school systems in America because those had not reopened. But she didn’t want to say that, even though telling the truth would have been good for all kids. Because her priority was her own career, not kids. And her career couldn’t be promoted if she didn’t say things that DeVos/Trump could use to demand total school reopenings.
I really don’t understand people like Oster who were born into privilege and are unable to muster the least empathy for parents of vulnerable families. Oster seems to believe that by exposing the most vulnerable families to crowded, poorly ventilated schools, she is doing them a great favor and if she’s wrong, they should be grateful to her that she is using them to gather data.
NYCPP: I have my problems, to be sure. But I have it better than the vast majority of NYC public school parents. Imagine what it’s like to be a single parent, with three kids in an 600-square-foot apartment, doing “remote learning,” not having a college education, being unable to help your kids with their homework, unable to get your kids to read (and you don’t read much yourself or have many books in the house), not knowing if your kids are actually logging on to their ridiculing remote classes, and being told that it’s too dangerous to send your kids to school and that it may not be safe for a year or more. Imagine children in abusive households, stuck in that apartment all day, every day. This is not about me.
There is a horrific toll being inflicted on children right now. And yes, commenters of course will be sympathetic when someone brings it up. But no one brings it up, except for a few pariahs who get piled on as anti-science morons. It’s weird and it doesn’t reflect well on the commenters on this blog, to be frank.
FLERP –
It may not be safe for a year or more to send kids in some school systems to school buildings. That’s a reality, an awful one to be sure, but step one is containment of the virus. We ought to accept that as a possibility and work as hard as we can to avoid so prolonged a time out of formal in-person schooling.
To do so we need two things: money and consensus.
We must have a shared goal of taking the common sense measures of masking, distancing and hand washing; all rowing in the same direction. It is political polarization that has made it impossible to approach this problem in a logical way.
And money? We know some folks just do not want to spend money on improving infrastructure in the school buildings which serve precisely those 3 kids in a 600 sf apartment.
Here’s a thread in which a member of the Worcester MA School Committee outlines the cost factors, and notes she hasn’t even touched on the pandemic itself:
If we had a President who was doing his job, we wouldn’t be wondering what a female professor from Rhode Island was saying.
I would just like to make it clear that it has nothing to do with her being female.
I would be just as critical of a male economics professor.
And actually have been on many occasions here (of Teaching economist, who I would bet my life is male, and of Oster cheerleader and sometime publisher , Steven Levitt, who I have noted made nonsense claims about climate science in his book Superfreakonomics.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
It’s no accident that Levitt and Oster seem to be a tag team. Both were at the U of Chicago and both have made names for themselves by publishing popular bullshit in books.
Levitt’s writings make him appear to be a jerk. His blog betrays exactly what he is. On occasion some of his commenters rightly call him out about his biases.
Give that woman a cigar! Much more succinct than me.