Emily Oster on the Pandemic 11/30/2020

Economist and author Emily Oster of Brown University talks about the challenge of reopening schools in a pandemic with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Oster has been collecting data from K-12 schools around the country. Her preliminary analysis finds little evidence that schools are super-spreaders of Covid. She argues that closing schools comes at a high cost for the students with little benefit in reducing the spread of the disease. The conversation ends with a discussion of parenting.

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[enjolraslechimiste]

Sir: I disagree that businesses should be able to choose about masks. It is a hard thing to ask a business to anger customers, lose money; many businesses do not want to be "the bad guy." I feel awful for friends of mine who own restaurants who get screamed at for making choices to enforce mask usage; I feel bad for Walmart who must decide how much resources to expend to enforce masks. This is a positive externality that should be encouraged. Separately, it is not respecting personal liberty if so many people are dying. The "liberty" to not wear a mask has a negative externality: the virus spreads, and everyone else continues to have to be in fear.

[markswifte]

There are some faults I believe in your analysis. Firstly, lowering the level of contact students and teachers have doesn’t have to result in a ‘loss of education’ for a month. As John Hattie showed, students in Christchurch, New Zealand, missed 10 weeks of in-class lessons due to the earthquake there and their results improved!