Emily Oster Quotes

All's fair in love and purchasing.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

Talking to women about birth can be polarizing.

Even if you are planning a birth with an epidural, the evidence suggests that a doula can help make things go much more smoothly.

In short, humans are programmed to get bored.

Education campaigns ... may not be enough, at least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior.

You work hard for your income, and that hard work is what fuels the economy.

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

As people do a task, they improve at it.

Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.

Adhering to budgeting rules shouldn't trump good decision-making.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I'm an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.

Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring.

Prenatal testing is a complicated decision for many women, forcing us to confront concerns about a disabled child and risks of miscarriage.

The most active period of the witchcraft trials coincides with a period of lower than average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age"...In a time period when the reasons for changes in weather were largely a mystery, people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns. 'Witches' became target for blame because there was an existing cultural framework that both allowed their persecution and suggested that they could control the weather.

For many women - myself included - pregnancy brings on tremendous anxiety and confusion, along with the joy.

Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.