My interview with parenting expert Emily Oster.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Memorial Day.

First, a reminder that the Tangle team observes federal holidays and is off today for Memorial Day. For those observing, I hope you have a meaningful holiday — it is a time to reflect on the people who made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the liberties and freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. Reminder: Memorial Day is not like Veterans Day, and is not meant to be a celebration. It’s a somber day for remembrance. You can read more about the meaning of the holiday here. 

Still, despite being off, we wanted to offer you a great piece of content today. So we’ve decided to share our interview with Emily Oster — economist, parenting expert, and perhaps one of the most influential people in America.

When my wife became pregnant, one of the first things we did was seek out information about her pregnancy. We researched  what she could and couldn't do, how her body was going to change throughout the process, and what would happen shortly after our new baby was born. Immediately, we were dropped into the world of Emily Oster. 

Emily is an author and economist who has served as a professor of economics at Brown University since 2015. She's best known for her writing on pregnancy and parenthood and her company, ParentData, which she founded in 2020 to provide data-driven guidance for parents. She attended Harvard for her bachelor’s and PhD, graduating in 2006 with a dissertation on infectious disease. She's the author of four books: Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected. 

She is somebody who, in my estimation, is driving the decisions that parents make today in America more than just about any single person I can think of. She tackles controversial issues. She tackles parenting issues you’ve probably never even thought about. She tackles political issues — things that touch politics and parenting, like what we should do about decreasing fertility rates, or how we can better support families in the United States. And she does it all through a data-first lens. 

I'll be candid — I'm a fan. I'm a reader of her newsletter, I've read one of her books, and I’ve found her work indispensable. I wanted to interview her to expand on some of the things that have happened to her throughout her writing career — some of the controversies she has sparked, some of the interesting debates she’s stepped into, and one of the things that I feel like she never talks about, which is: what are the things that scare her as a parent? What's happening in her personal parenting life with her own two children? 

So in today’s edition (which we’re also releasing as a podcast episode), we did just that. I sat down with Emily Oster for about 45 minutes, and we touched on many of her most controversial and interesting writings. We talked about how she started doing the work she does, why she does it in the first place, how she responds to controversy and criticism, and what things actually scare or stress her out as a parent. It was a compelling interview, and I think you all are really going to enjoy it. Below, you’ll find a transcript of our conversation, which has been edited lightly for length and clarity. You can listen to the full discussion here.  

Isaac Saul: Emily Oster, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Emily Oster: Thanks so much for having me.

Isaac Saul: First of all, I have to confess — I'm a fan. I don't usually do this at the top of interviews. I'm sure you get it all the time. I have a new four-month-old baby at home. 

Emily Oster: Congratulations!

Isaac Saul: Thank you very much. I'm a new parent, and in this psychotic thing that is parenting where you're Googling every scary thing that happens in pregnancy and post-pregnancy, I came across a lot of your work and you became a really great resource for me. I appreciate all the stuff that you've done and certainly have found it really beneficial for myself and my wife. 

Emily Oster: Thank you.

Isaac Saul: I'd like to start with a basic question that I guess has a really complicated answer. I'm 34. A lot of my friends are not having kids these days, and I think there are a lot of reasons why.

I know you've written a lot about this, and I know it's becoming a really important issue in the country politically. People are talking about it more now than I think they ever have, and I'd be curious to get the lay of the land from you on why people aren't having as many kids right now — if that's true or that's just my impression, what the data says, and what you're hearing from people.

Emily Oster: It's a big question, but let's start with the biggest global take, and then we can dial down a little bit into what we know and what we don't know. 

If we think globally, fertility rates are on the decline everywhere. At this point, every rich country has a fertility rate below replacement, so that's below about 2.1. There are a number of places in Asia that have fertility rates below one, which means their populations are cratering very quickly. Even if we look at less developed countries where the fertility rates tend to be higher, we have still seen very, very large declines. 25 years ago, 30 years ago, there were places that had a fertility rate of eight. No place has a fertility rate of eight anymore. 

We've really seen this global decline and a particular decline in developed countries to below replacement. That's the basic, overlay fact, and I think that's important to note because a lot of the explanations we can get into are informed by observing that this is not a U.S.-specific phenomena. 

Now, “How much have the fertility rates declined?” is actually not a super straightforward question because the way we measure fertility rates or total fertility rate is to look at a given year and the fertility rate at each age, and then effectively add them up as if a woman is experiencing all of those ages exactly as they are in this year over her life. That works fine if you're in a steady state, but one of the things that is happening now is people are having kids later. So as we are moving fertility later and later, you may get a situation in which the current people who are 34 don't have kids at 34 like people used to, but actually now they have kids at 41. Maybe, they end up with about the same number of kids as they did before, but they're later. 

Then our measure of total fertility is going to overstate the extent of decline. So the data is a little tricky, but on the whole, it's pretty clear fertility rates have gone down a fair amount, and are now low enough that the population is expected to shrink.

Isaac Saul: Obviously, there are a lot of contributing factors to the decline. A lot of people have different solutions, and one of the ones I've seen that's fairly common is the cash incentive. That's something President Trump is reportedly considering now: a $5,000 payout or tax break for your child; we also had the child tax credit. You've written a little bit about this. Tell me what you're seeing in terms of whether financial incentives or something like we've seen in Israel or South Korea could actually spur people to have more children.

Emily Oster: The evidence on financial payments for kids is mixed and not super encouraging as a game-changing solution. There are some episodes where there were large, seemingly sizable fertility changes in response to incentives. Those incentives were very big, far in excess of $5,000 — closer to a year's salary. So with really big incentives, you can get people to have some more kids. Even those effects are not enormously large, and some of them seem to be moving fertility rather than increasing it overall. So imagine I tell you: if you have a baby now, I'm going to give you $10,000, but you were going to have a baby either now or in a year. So you’re going to have it now for my $10,000. That's different from taking someone who wasn't going to have a kid and saying, “Okay, this is going to totally increase the amount of babies.”

So could there be a little bit of an impact or a little bit of change in timing of those kind of policies? Yes, they probably need to be larger than $5,000, and we should not expect this to return the U.S. to replacement. For sure, those effects are small. 

Isaac Saul: Do you think the takeaway there is that people aren't actually so cash-strapped that they're not having kids? How do we interpret that?

Emily Oster: It's tricky because I think there's also some evidence on child supports, and I would say they're more direct things that would be more directly impactful, like support for things that will help you pay for preschool or child care, stuff like that. And again, those show the same sort of, “There are some positive impacts that are relatively small.” 

I don't know if I would say it tells us that people aren't having kids for this reason, but when I look at the global changes in fertility, when you are seeing the same or even larger declines in places like Norway, Sweden, where we know that the social supports are very great, it does suggest that there's something going on beyond family supports. That's different from saying we shouldn't have family supports. I feel pretty strongly that we should be having better support for families in the US, but it doesn't feel to me that those changes are really, deeply what's behind the fertility declines.

Isaac Saul: That invites the question of what factors you think are pushing the fertility decline.

Emily Oster: There's several leading theories. Let me speculate. I'm not sure we can really settle on one of these, but if we think about the theory for what might be going on, here's a few: 

1. People are waiting until later to have kids. That's both actually causing us to overstate how much fertility decline there really is, but also, because it becomes more difficult to have children when you're older, some of the people who intended to have kids end up basically running out of time. Either they are not able to conceive or they have one instead of two or two instead of three. So some of this is almost a problem of waiting and then finding you can't. 
2. Teen birth rates have totally cratered. Teens are not having a lot of kids. That's actually a good thing in the U.S. We don't like that; that's on purpose. We tried to get those to go down, but it is clearly true that that used to be a group that was contributing a reasonable amount. 15 to 19 year olds were having some kids and now they are really not having any kids. And that's a technological change that is all for the good. People have better control over their fertility. There are fewer accidents, more long-acting, reversible contraception, things like that. 
3. More people are deciding not to have children. I don't know what that is. It feels like that has to be a piece of it, people deciding not to have kids. If we put it aside and say it can't all be because it's too expensive or because there's something there where more people are just saying, “This is not for me.” We're seeing more people having no kids, as opposed to the fertility declines that have happened in the past where people used to have six and they had five or they went from three to two. This is like going to zero. I'm not sure what that is, but that feels like the key thing we're struggling to understand is this decision saying, “I could have children. I have resources to have children, but I am choosing not to for other reasons.”

Isaac Saul: That's a great point. I have actually written about this. From my perspective, there is this cultural thing, this big cultural question mark that's mysterious, which doesn't feel like there's a policy solution to. It's just sort of a social, cultural phenomenon that we might have to shift by winning the argument that kids are great and beautiful and you should do it and it'll enrich your life. That debate isn't necessarily happening right now. We're just throwing money or policy solutions at it. You mentioned earlier that you do think we should have more family support in the United States. You just don't think that's necessarily going to be the silver bullet for solving fertility stuff.

Make that case for me. What's the upside of family support? How do we compare to other countries? Why should people who are watching their tax dollars get sucked up by the federal government want it to go to things like supporting families in the U.S.?

Emily Oster: The easiest thing to argue for is paid parental leave. We do not have any federal paid parental leave for women or men in the U.S., and that means that there are a lot of women in the U.S. who are having a baby and going back to often manual labor jobs after two weeks, a point at which they are still experiencing pretty substantial complications from childbirth. There's an argument in favor of better parental leave, which is an argument based on being a good person, and ethics, like “That doesn't feel ethical; it doesn't feel like we want to live in a society where that's the expectation.”

And there's also a practical, cost-based argument, which is that when kids get sick, it's expensive. And we know from the data that kids get sick more when they are in daycare before six or eight weeks, and they get more RSV, and there are more RSV deaths. Even if you didn't care about the ethics and all you cared about was Medicaid tax dollars, it would still potentially be efficient to provide some maternal paid leave that people could access so they could stay home for longer. There's a bunch of practical, cost-based arguments for that particular intervention.

And then there are some labor market efficiency arguments for childcare supports because we know when we provide better childcare supports, women are more likely to stay in the labor force, and women staying in the labor force produces more tax dollars later, improving their lives, improving the lives of their kids, but also providing more tax dollars. For me, part of the reason to do this is I think we deserve to give the kids who are born in the U.S. a fighting chance to have a good start, and a lot of these policies would particularly help out families with fewer resources whose kids are not getting all the things they need at the beginning. But even if you're making just venal, economic arguments, there are actually pretty strong ones in favor of a lot of these programs effectively paying for themselves in various short- and long-term ways.

Isaac Saul: To put a fine point on the healthcare point, you were saying that the actual healthcare costs increase when we send a mom or dad back to work sooner because it increases the chance that their baby's gonna get sick because they have to go to daycare or they're bringing stuff home from work or wherever else. Then we're paying for that on the insurance side.

Emily Oster: Yeah, and because a lot of this is going to hit Medicaid, we're paying for it on the insurance side with tax dollars that are funding Medicaid. We have some good, relatively recent evidence about RSV, and particularly in respiratory illness, that when you give people eight weeks of paid leave, you see less respiratory hospitalizations for RSV in kids. And again, those hospitalizations are really expensive. Having a baby in the PICU, in the pediatric ICU, for a week costs Medicaid quite a lot of money.

Isaac Saul: That makes sense. I definitely became a little bit radicalized on this question after just going through my experience. My wife had a very uncomplicated, straightforward birth, thank God, and week two, we were sitting in bed. She's still bed bound and we're just looking at each other like, “Holy shit. I can't believe there are people going back to work where you are right now.” The baby is totally helpless and dependent on her for everything. I'm pretty much useless. It's insane. It really changed my perspective on it in a really profound way. I run Tangle, and I have 10 full-time employees, and I was like, “Have as much paternity leave as you want.” Because it seems so nuts to send people back to work at that stage after seeing it up close myself.

Emily Oster: I think many people would agree with that. I think part of what's gotten in the way of this particular policy at the federal level is that it is so popular that everybody wants to stick it in some bill full of stuff the other side doesn't like — it's like, “but also maternity leave in addition to all this crap you don't like.” And that's been an issue, but a lot of states have ponied up on paid leave, which I think is great. More is better.

Isaac Saul: Yeah, our great, big, beautiful, dysfunctional Congress at work there with those kinds of tactics. It makes you want to rip your hair out, for sure. 

Our recent coverage of the declining birth rate stuff sparked a very interesting response that I suspect you've run into. It was the first time I got it en masse. We have a mailing list of 400,000 people, and we got hundreds of emails from people after we covered Trump's baby bonus, as he's calling it. I cited some of your writing in my analysis, and there were a lot of people who wrote in and said, “We shouldn't try to fix this issue. The declining birth rate is actually a good thing. The country's overpopulated. Our resources are strained, there’s climate change, the environment's being destroyed.” 

That, interestingly enough, is right in your strike zone. It's at the intersection of economics and parenting. I understand from your writing that you do view dropping fertility rates as an issue, so I'm curious what you make of that response and how you make that argument.