Tangle - PREVIEW - Isaac talks with Emily Oster

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

On today's episode, Isaac talks with Emily Oster, economist, author, and CEO of ParentData, to discuss declining fertility rates globally, the impact of financial incentives on birth rates, and the various factors influencing people's decisions to have children, which not only include financial constraints, but also by changing societal attitudes towards parenthood. They talk about cultural and policy implications of family support and fertility in the United States, the need for paid parental leave, the debate surrounding declining birth rates, and the evolving concerns of parents over the years. They examine the impact of COVID-19 on education, the political ramifications of parenting decisions, and the role of data in making informed choices. Finally, they address the challenges of parenting in the age of social media and the fears that modern parents face.By the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. When my wife became pregnant, one of the first things we started to do was seek out information about her pregnancy, about what she could and couldn't do, about how her body was going to change throughout her pregnancy and what would happen shortly after our new baby was born. And 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, Crib Sheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected. And she is basically somebody who in my estimation is driving the decisions that parents make today in America more than just about any single person that I can think of. She tackles controversial issues. She tackles issues you probably never thought of about parenting. She tackles controversial issues. She tackles issues you probably never thought of

about parenting. She tackles controversial political issues, things that kind of touch politics and parenting like what we should do about dropping fertility rates or how we can better support families in the United States. And she does it all through this data first lens. I found her work indispensable. I'll be candid and you'll hear it at the top of the show. I'm a fan. I'm a reader of her newsletter.

I've read one of her books. I really appreciate the work that she's done. And I also wanted her to expand on some of the things that have happened to her throughout her writing career, some of the controversies that she has sparked, some of the interesting debates that she stepped into. And one of the things that I feel like she never talks about, which is, what are the things as a parent that scare her? I mean, what's happening in her personal parenting life? She has two children of her own. So on today's podcast episode, we did just that. We sat down with Emily Osser 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 are the things that actually scare or stress her out as a parent. It was a really, really interesting interview. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. So without further ado, here's Emily Oster. Emily Oster, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. So 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. So. Congratulations. Thank you very much.

I'm a new parent and in, you know, the 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. So I'm sure you get it all the time, but I appreciate all the stuff that you've done pregnancy. I came across a lot of your work and you became a really great resource for me. So I'm sure you get it all the time, but I appreciate all the stuff that you've done and

certainly have found it really beneficial for myself and my wife. Thank you. I'd like to start. Yeah, you're welcome. I'd like to start with just 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. I guess I'd be curious to just get the lay of the land from you, 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 kind of what you're hearing from people. Yeah, so 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. So, if we think globally,

fertility rates are on the decline everywhere. So in every, at this point, every kind of 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. And then even if we look at less developed countries where the fertility rates tend to be higher, we have still seen very, very large declines. You know, 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. So we've really seen this kind of global decline and a particular decline in developed countries to below replacement. So, that's kind of the basic overlay fact. And I think that's important to note because a lot of the explanations that we can get into are informed by observing that this is not a US specific phenomenon. 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, and then that's the total fertility rate. 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. As we are moving fertility later and later,

you may get a situation in which the current people who are 34, And so as we are sort of moving fertility later and later, you may get a situation in which the kind of current people who are 34 don't have kids at 34 like people used to, but actually now they have kids at 41. And maybe they end up with about the same number of kids as they did before, but they're later. And so then our kind of measure of total fertility rate that we have in the moment is gonna 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. Obviously, there are a lot of contributing factors to this. A lot of people have different solutions. One of the ones that I've seen that's fairly common is the cash incentive, the birth boosting incentive. That's something President Trump is reportedly considering now. $5,000 payout or tax break for your child. We have the child tax credit. You've written a little bit about this.

Tell me what you're seeing in terms of whether financial incentives are something like we've seen in Israel, South Korea that could actually spur people to have more children. So the evidence on financial payments for kids is mixed and not super encouraging about this 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, so far in excess of $5,000, closer to a year's salary, effectively.

So 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 sort of Moving fertility kind of moving fertility rather than increasing it overall So, you know, I tell you if you have a baby now Like I'm gonna give you ten thousand dollars and you were gonna have a baby there now or in a year So I'm gonna have it now for my ten thousand dollars But that's different from taking someone who wasn't gonna have a kid and saying okay

This is like going to totally increase the amount of babies. So I'm going to have it now for my $10,000. But that's different from taking someone who wasn't going to have a kid and saying, OK, this is like going to totally increase the amount of babies. So I would say, 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. expect this to return the US to replacement. For sure, those effects are small. 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? Yeah, it's tricky because I think that there's also some evidence on child supports, which does seem to, again, and I would say they're like more direct things that would be more directly impactful, like support for things that will help you pay for preschool, childcare, stuff like that. Again, those show the same sort of there are some positive impacts, they're 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 U.S. But it doesn't feel to me that those changes are really deeply what's behind the fertility to cause.

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. So I guess that kind of invites the question of like what factors do you think are out there that are pushing that? Yeah. So, I guess I would say there's sort of two, 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. So one is that people are waiting until later to have kids, and 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, that 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. And so some of this is almost a sort of problem of kind of waiting and then finding you can't. So I think that's one piece that may be going on. I think there's another piece that's sort of pretty clearly going on, which is that

teen birth rates have totally cratered. Like teens are not having a lot of kids. That's actually a good thing in the US. I mean, we don't like that. That's our 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 to 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. So those are kind of two practical things that may be going on. It seems clear to me that part of what's going on is just more people are deciding not to have children. And I don't know what that is. I mean, that sort of feels like that has to be a piece of it, people deciding not to have kids. And if we sort of put 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, like, this is not for me. And you know, we're seeing more people having no kids, as opposed to the kind of fertility declines that have happened in the past where, you know, people used to have six and they

had five and, you know, they only have from three to two. This is like going to zero. And I'm not sure what that is. But that feels like the key thing that we're struggling to understand is just this decision, sort of saying, like, I could have children, I have resources to have children, but I am choosing not to. Yeah. So that's a great point. I mean, I have actually written about this, which from my perspective, there is kind of

this, I guess I called it like a cultural thing, this sort of big cultural question mark that's kind of mysterious, which is like, doesn't feel like there's a policy solution. It's just sort of a social cultural phenomenon that we might have to shift by kind of winning the argument that like kids are great and beautiful and you should do it and it'll enrich your life. And that that debate maybe isn't necessarily happening right now. We're just kind of like throwing money or policy solutions at it.

I'm curious. I mean, 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 kind of silver bullet for solving fertility stuff. Make that case for me. What's the upside of the 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 US? 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 US. And that means that there are a lot of women in the US who are having a baby and going back to often manual labor jobs after two weeks, a point at which they're still experiencing pretty substantial complications from childbirth. So there's an argument in favor of better parental leave, which is an argument based on being a good person, ethics.

That doesn't feel ethical, doesn't feel like we want to live in a society where that's the expectation. And then I think there's just 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, there are more RSV deaths. So there's a bunch of actual, even if you didn't care about the ethics

and all you cared about was like 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. So I think there's a bunch of just practical cost-based arguments for that particular intervention. And then I think that there are some, again, some efficiency, 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. So I mean, again, for me, part of this reason, part of the reasons to do this is just I think we deserve to give the kids who are born in the US a fighting chance to have a good start. And a lot of these policies would particularly help families with fewer resources whose kids are not getting all the things they need at the beginning. But even if you're making just sort of venal economic arguments, actually pretty strong ones in favor of a lot of these programs effectively paying for themselves

in various sort of short and long-term ways. So just to put a fine point on that first kind of the healthcare point, you were saying that the actual healthcare costs increase when we send a mom or dad back to work sooner because they're basically increases the chance that their baby's gonna get sick because they have to go to daycare They're bringing stuff home from work or whatever else and then we're paying for that on the insurance side Yeah, and because a lot of this is gonna hit for Medicaid. It's actually we're paying for it on the insurance side with Tax dollars that are funding Medicaid and so we have some good, actually good, relatively reasoned evidence about RSV, in particular, respiratory illness, that basically 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. Yeah, that makes sense. I will say, I mean, I definitely became a little bit radicalized on this question after just going through my experience. I mean, my wife had a very uncomplicated, straightforward birth, thank God. And week two, I mean, we were sitting in bed,

she's like still bed bound. And we're just looking at each other like, holy shit, I can't believe you, like 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.

I mean, it's insane. And it really, it changed my perspective on it in a really profound way. I mean, I run Tangle and I have 10 full-time employees and I was like, unlimited, like, post-birth, you know, have as much paternity if you want. Because it's just, it seems so nuts to send people back to work at that stage after seeing it up close myself. Yeah. And I think many people would agree with that. I actually 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 because it's like, well, but also we've in addition to all this crap you don't like. And that's been an issue, but we'll see whether... I mean, a lot of states have ponied up on paid leave, which I think is great. Yeah, our great, big, beautiful, dysfunctional Congress at work there with those kinds of tactics, I mean, makes you want to rip your hair out for sure. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Our recent coverage of the declining birthrate stuff sparked a very interesting response that I suspect that you've run into. It was the first time I sort of got it in mass.

We have a mailing list of like 400,000 people and we got hundreds of emails from people after we talked about, we covered Trump's baby bonus as he's calling it. We actually cited some of your writing or I did in some of my analysis. And there were a lot of people who wrote in and just 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. climate change, the environments being destroyed. That strikes me interestingly enough as something right in your strike zone. It's kind of the intersection of economics and parenting stuff.

I guess I'm curious what you make of that response and how you kind of make the case. I think I understand from your writing that you do view dropping fertility rates as an issue and how you kind of make the case. I think I understand from your writing that you do view dropping fertility rates as an issue and how you kind of make that argument. Yeah, I mean, so there's a bunch of facets to this. So let me start by saying, I think from an economic growth standpoint, dropping fertility rates are a potential issue. Economic growth is about people.

And it's not that this sort of view like society is gonna collapse into a heap of dust if we don't have people, that's not right. But the structure of society, the way things will look, it's gonna be very different if we have many fewer kids. And you can look at some of these East Asian, like South Korea, Japan, the structure of society is really different when it's a lot of old people and not a lot of kids.

And that's sort of the short term. And then in the long term, declining fertility rates have implications for cities and for just other aspects of life. Now I think other people will say, look, climate change, et cetera, it would be better to have fewer people. That feels like a philosophical and an ethical debate that different people will come down in different ways on. You know, I think you can read your boss do that from the times who has a very strong view that like, you know, people are good. Other people have a

view like people are sort of fundamentally bad and like fewer of them is is better. I don't like I think people are good. For me, in some ways, the more interesting question is, backing up from that from the individual standpoint, do we want to encourage, should we be encouraging people to have children? I think that comes down to the question of whether you think people are making a mistake when they choose not to. If we accept that a people are making a mistake when they choose not to. If we accept that a lot of people are saying, I choose not to, and then if we're at least some of those people, it's not like I don't think I could afford it, but I don't want

to do this. This isn't a change to my lifestyle I want to make. One view is like, you see the options? We may not having kids, a more reasonable option. It used to be like everybody had kids or you know, it was like, there's no birth control. And so like we're forced into this. Now like that's a real choice not to have kids. And if people choose not to have kids, like that's choice and we should be encouraging choice. And I think another

view is that this is a very, that people are exposed making a mistake. And then in fact, like they would be happier if they had children and somehow they're missing some crucial piece of information that would show them that. And then we are like, then they're making a mistake. And I think those are sort of two different views about just the individual choice,

even putting aside the sort of like, what does this mean for society picture? I'm curious, you've been doing this for over a decade now. I mean, I just looked it up to make sure I had this, but your first book was published in 2013 on parenting. That's 12 years to now from your book being published. I imagine it took years of research just to get the book out. I'm curious how the kind of questions have changed

over the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, are you getting different inquiries from new parents? Are the concerns shifting? Like, how's the tide moving? Or is it just kind of a lot of the same stuff coming up over and over again? Yeah, things shift. You know, people have gotten way more into data. Like, I was on like a little bit of the weeding edge of the idea you could use data to make choices. Now people are very into using science and data. So that's been interesting.

And there are certainly questions that I did not used to get, that I get now. The number one question I get every single week when I talk on Instagram, I get it all the time in emails and it gets asked all the time in emails and it gets asked all the time on our on parent data is can I use Botox while I'm breastfeeding. Somehow like when I was having my kid like no, it was into Botox. Now Botox is like everybody has Botox.

100% of people have Botox. And so I don't know, like that's new. That was like it didn't even put it in the first book. I had like in the last revision, we had to put a chapter in about Botox. It's like you're missing. Oh, God. That's bizarre. I will say, sort of at a deeper level,

I think that there is, there feels like more anxiety to me about how much we might be messing our kids up. And I think this is a little, feels a little bit like a post-COVID hangover, although it's hard for me to tell because I like, I started doing so much more of this work during COVID. So I'm like, not sure how much is just amount of questions as opposed to the 10 hour questions. I do feel like people are. Hey, everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle.

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to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Morehead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website

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