[alan-hn]

Its no surprise that an economist cherry picked and used anecdote to support their writing. It's one of the least rigorous fields out there whose practitioners are primarily used to green light whatever policy a politician deems fashionable or appropriate

[arrowsmith]

Indeed. Economics is the art of using meaningless spreadsheets and number-crunching to justify the decisions you were going to make anyway. Oster's book is a great example of how.

[Apocryphon]

It sounds like you’re getting mad at someone for reading Malcolm Gladwell or Freakanomics. It might be NYT bestseller middlebrow pop science that you find facile and contemptuous but a lot of people do not. And the author doesn’t even indicate how Oster informed his parenting. Seems overly dismissive of the article.

[arrowsmith]

You're right, I regret my original, snide comment. It's barely relevant to the article and I should have known it would derail the thread.

Too late to undo it now, but lesson learned.

[slothtrop]

This is pretty disingenuous. Oster's book(s) is tantamount to long-form data journalism, principally citing research to criticize confidence in certain notions rather than arguing for overconfidence in another.

Much like nutrition and sociology, research can be politically fraught, have lots of data points, etc. But that's neither here nor there, either research is high quality or it isn't, including in the domain of economy.