February 6, 2025 • 12 mins
In the last month, we've aired podcast conversations with Dr. Nathan Fox and Dr. Bapu Jena, and though the content is different, there’s an underlying thread that connects them both: what it means to deal with risk, and uncertainty. And not lose your mind.
Economists deal with this constantly, and so do parents, but not in the same way. Economists learn not to panic in ways that parents, understandably, have a really hard time with. We’re trained to read the studies, and spot their holes, or their aims and impacts. Yes, we live in a world with trace amounts of lead in Cheerios, and sometimes it can feel scary to leave the house. But things that are low risk are low risk, no matter how scary they feel.
Today on ParentData, Emily reads her recent article on risk and uncertainty aloud, and encourages us all to think about risk like economists, so that we can internalize it as sane parents.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster. Welcome back to
another parent data article read aloud. In the last month,
I've recorded podcasts with both doctor Bapu Jetta and doctor
Nate Fox, two people who I consider my good friends
and also excellent sources of risk management. Even though those
(00:24):
conversations centered around specific things like how research studies make
get into the news in the case of Bapu, or
questions about pregnancy and postpartum in the case of Nate,
there's an underlying thread that connects them both. What it
means to deal with risk and with uncertainty and not
lose your mind while doing it. Economists deal with this constantly,
(00:45):
and so to parents, but not in the same way.
Economists learn not to panic in ways that parents understandably
have a really hard time with. We're trained to read
the studies and spot their holes or their aims, their impacts,
and that's what today's articles about it. Yes, we live
in a world with scary things like trace amounts of
lead in cheerios, and sometimes we just feel like we
(01:08):
can't leave the house. But things that are low risk
are low risk no matter how scary they feel. So
today we're going to think about risk like an economist,
so that we can, I hope, try to internalize it
as a sane parent after the break, Understanding risk, living
with uncertainty and what I actually worry about as a parent.
(01:37):
Understanding risk, living with uncertainty and what I actually worry
about as a parent. The core of my job is
communication about what I call panic headlines. These are headlines
in newspapers on Instagram that provoke panic in parents. Often
it's along the lines of new study says or experts claim,
(02:00):
followed by a terrifying claim screens cause developmental delays, hot
dogs linked with cancer. In a very large number of cases,
the panic these produce is misplaced, and I spend a
lot of time talking people down. A result of this
is that people often ask me if there is anything
I do worry about. The answer is yes. My two
(02:22):
big safety worries with kids are cars and swimming pools.
These are both sources of sizable risk for kids, but
neither of them gets much panic headline coverage, likely because
they aren't new and surprising. Panic headlines instead tend to
focus on things that you aren't currently thinking about, but,
(02:43):
according to the headlines anyway should be When processing new
panic headlines, I end up pulling heavily on my communication
about one of two things, risk or uncertainty. In my experience,
much of the panic comes from our difficulty in understanding
small risks and from the challenge of living with uncertainty. Today,
(03:06):
I want to flesh out both of those ideas with
some tools to discipline our thinking understanding risk. People are
extremely bad at understanding probabilities. This is especially true for
very small or very large probabilities. Research and economics and
psychology has shown us that people overestimate small probabilities and
(03:30):
underestimate large ones. Take the small probability case. Let's say
I tell you there is a chance that something happens
one in a thousand times and a chance that some
other event happens one in five thousand times. These are
actually quite different. One happens five times as often as
(03:51):
the other, but for most of us they feel similar.
They're both small, but they aren't zero that one. It's
why we play the lottery, even a chance of one
in eighty million. You're telling me there's a chance. This
internal psychology causes us to process even really unlikely events
(04:13):
like the lottery as similarly likely to an event that happens,
say one in a thousand times. This confusion about small
probabilities can push us to give attention to risks that
may not be worth our time. I've talked in the
past about the risk of injury for children on airplanes.
A comprehensive paper estimated the risk of injury to a
(04:36):
child under two at about one in two hundred and
fifty thousand. Some of these injuries likely would have been
prevented if the child was in a car seat in
their own airplane seat, So purchasing a seat could lower
the injury risk by as much as one in two
hundred and fifty thousand, assuming all injuries would have been prevented.
(04:58):
A gut reaction to this one I got on Instagram
is to say any risk reduction is worth it for
your child. I can see the logic here, but the
reality is that this risk is just extremely small. The
annual risk of car accident injury for a child under
fourteen is about one in five hundred. The annual risk
(05:19):
of a cancer diagnosis for a child under five is
about one in four thy five hundred. Does this mean
you shouldn't use a car seat on an airplane. No.
If you want to go ahead, and there may be
other reasons to do so, but making a good decision
about trade offs here does require actually understanding the size
of the risk. How to conceptualize risk. Risk is not
(05:46):
intuitive to people, even for people who do this as
their job. It's not something our brains naturally get, which
means you need to actively find approaches that work for
you to turn probably into something concrete that you can understand.
The two approaches I like the best other common comparisons
(06:08):
and a conversion to time. First other comparisons. A simple
way to think about risk is to ask what other
events occur with this probability. It's not an exact science,
but we can often get some context for probabilities. For example,
one in two hundred and fifty thousand is on the
(06:29):
lower end of the estimated risk of being killed by
a meteorite. A related form of this comparison is to
take some risk that you do feel comfortable understanding, like
the risk of car accidents, and use it as a benchmark.
A second option time. This is my go to convert
risks into time, as in, if I took this risk
(06:53):
every single day, how long would it take before I
would expect the event to happen once. For something with
a risk of one in ten, you'd expect it about
every ten days. For a risk of one in one hundreds,
more like every three months, one in a thousand, every
three years. For comparisons like one in one thousand versus
(07:13):
one in five thousand, that's every three years versus every
fifteen years, and those feel, at least to me very different.
Note a daily risk of one in two hundred and
fifty thousand translates to once every six hundred and eighty
four years. Bottom line on risk. A lot of panic
(07:34):
ensues when we do not correctly conceptualize risks, especially when
they are small. The first step is to discipline your
risk thinking living with uncertainty. Although we often use them interchangeably,
(07:56):
risk and uncertainty are different. Risk means a defined chance
of something happening or not. You may be uncertain about
which outcome will occur, but you are certain about the
possible outcomes and their probabilities of happening. Uncertainty, at least
formally to an economist, means we do not even know
(08:18):
the probabilities that we're facing, and sometimes we don't know
what the possible outcomes are. With uncertainty, we often cannot
even get our heads around what we are facing, and
that's a bigger challenge than understanding probabilities. A great example
of a panic headline driven by uncertainty was Costco sued
(08:38):
for toxic chemicals in its baby wipes. The story behind
this is a class action suit that claims two high
levels of the forever chemical p fas were found in
a widely used Costco brand of baby wipes. This headline
has uncertainty on many levels. It's not clear to what
degree we should be worried about pfas in general, what
(09:00):
the risks are, how large they are. It's not clear
what the levels are in the wipes. It's not clear
how much the wipes would actually transfer p fast to
a baby. In the absence of these answers, we fill
in with often worst case scenarios. It's easy to think
this must be serious. It's a lawsuit, though it's worth
(09:20):
remembering that there are a lot of reasons to file
class action lawsuits, and these same filers have other ongoing
lawsuits against Costco. Precisely because there is so much uncertainty,
we cannot put these fears to rest with facts or logic.
Thinking about it more will not help. A similar case
(09:42):
can be made for many of the headlines we see
about screen time for little kids. You read something like
screen time linked to developmental delays, and there are a
million questions what kind of delays? There's no clear way
to translate many of the metrics in these papers into
real world outcomes, for which chill. Most of these studies
have heterogeneity across kids, what kind of screens? That's almost
(10:05):
never measured, And then people like me come along and
tell you, hey, actually, those studies just show correlation, not causation.
It's entirely possible that there's literally no effect at all
at anyone, but we can't know for sure because the
study is enabled to show us. It's uncertainty piled on uncertainty.
(10:28):
Unlike with risk, there aren't good tools for unpacking uncertainty.
As noted, thinking more will not help. What we may
have are tools for disciplining our interactions with these problems.
A first tool. Remember that in nearly all of these cases,
all of the ones that come to mind, like ultra
processed foods, microplastics, p fast screen time, the risks we
(10:52):
are talking about are definitely small if screen time caused
enormous developmental delays in most children, or even a small share,
we would likely know it small is than a number.
But I do think it's useful to keep in perspective
that a bag of Dorito's, or an Apple sauce pouch,
or a brand of wipes, or even an hour a
day of television is extremely unlikely to matter much in
(11:16):
the grand scheme of things. A second tool ask yourself, what,
if anything, can I do about this, and how hard
would it be to do it? Sometimes there is an
easy change that can remove the fears. If there is
another equal priced brand of wipes that you're indifferent about,
you may as well switch. Often though there really isn't
(11:38):
anything realistic you can do. Think of et panic headlines about, say,
microplastics in the water supply. Moving away from the municipal
water supply is not a feasible option for most of us.
We can advocate and vote for more water supply regulations,
but at the end of the day, we have to
realize that right now, this is a risk we have
to live with. Understand that this may sound callous and defeatist,
(12:03):
but spiraling anxiety doesn't actually help fix any problems. The
hardest cases are ones where there is something you could
change but it would make other things worse. You could
quit screen time cold turkey, but it would make your
life much harder and mean more frustration with your kids.
You could switch wipes, but it would cost more and
your kid would like them less, making diaper changes less fun,
(12:25):
and eating into funds they could be used for other things.
I would offer you the mantra. People face trade offs.
No option is perfect or without downsides. You have to
pick one and move forward. Ultimately, this is about living
with uncertainty. You will almost certainly never know whether you
(12:45):
made the right choice in any of these many many situations.
Often all we can do is embrace the uncertainty and
try to move on.
This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster. Welcome back to
another parent data article read aloud. In the last month,
I've recorded podcasts with both doctor Bapu Jetta and doctor
Nate Fox, two people who I consider my good friends
and also excellent sources of risk management. Even though those
(00:24):
conversations centered around specific things like how research studies make
get into the news in the case of Bapu, or
questions about pregnancy and postpartum in the case of Nate,
there's an underlying thread that connects them both. What it
means to deal with risk and with uncertainty and not
lose your mind while doing it. Economists deal with this constantly,
(00:45):
and so to parents, but not in the same way.
Economists learn not to panic in ways that parents understandably
have a really hard time with. We're trained to read
the studies and spot their holes or their aims, their impacts,
and that's what today's articles about it. Yes, we live
in a world with scary things like trace amounts of
lead in cheerios, and sometimes we just feel like we
(01:08):
can't leave the house. But things that are low risk
are low risk no matter how scary they feel. So
today we're going to think about risk like an economist,
so that we can, I hope, try to internalize it
as a sane parent after the break, Understanding risk, living
with uncertainty and what I actually worry about as a parent.
(01:37):
Understanding risk, living with uncertainty and what I actually worry
about as a parent. The core of my job is
communication about what I call panic headlines. These are headlines
in newspapers on Instagram that provoke panic in parents. Often
it's along the lines of new study says or experts claim,
(02:00):
followed by a terrifying claim screens cause developmental delays, hot
dogs linked with cancer. In a very large number of cases,
the panic these produce is misplaced, and I spend a
lot of time talking people down. A result of this
is that people often ask me if there is anything
I do worry about. The answer is yes. My two
(02:22):
big safety worries with kids are cars and swimming pools.
These are both sources of sizable risk for kids, but
neither of them gets much panic headline coverage, likely because
they aren't new and surprising. Panic headlines instead tend to
focus on things that you aren't currently thinking about, but,
(02:43):
according to the headlines anyway should be When processing new
panic headlines, I end up pulling heavily on my communication
about one of two things, risk or uncertainty. In my experience,
much of the panic comes from our difficulty in understanding
small risks and from the challenge of living with uncertainty. Today,
(03:06):
I want to flesh out both of those ideas with
some tools to discipline our thinking understanding risk. People are
extremely bad at understanding probabilities. This is especially true for
very small or very large probabilities. Research and economics and
psychology has shown us that people overestimate small probabilities and
(03:30):
underestimate large ones. Take the small probability case. Let's say
I tell you there is a chance that something happens
one in a thousand times and a chance that some
other event happens one in five thousand times. These are
actually quite different. One happens five times as often as
(03:51):
the other, but for most of us they feel similar.
They're both small, but they aren't zero that one. It's
why we play the lottery, even a chance of one
in eighty million. You're telling me there's a chance. This
internal psychology causes us to process even really unlikely events
(04:13):
like the lottery as similarly likely to an event that happens,
say one in a thousand times. This confusion about small
probabilities can push us to give attention to risks that
may not be worth our time. I've talked in the
past about the risk of injury for children on airplanes.
A comprehensive paper estimated the risk of injury to a
(04:36):
child under two at about one in two hundred and
fifty thousand. Some of these injuries likely would have been
prevented if the child was in a car seat in
their own airplane seat, So purchasing a seat could lower
the injury risk by as much as one in two
hundred and fifty thousand, assuming all injuries would have been prevented.
(04:58):
A gut reaction to this one I got on Instagram
is to say any risk reduction is worth it for
your child. I can see the logic here, but the
reality is that this risk is just extremely small. The
annual risk of car accident injury for a child under
fourteen is about one in five hundred. The annual risk
(05:19):
of a cancer diagnosis for a child under five is
about one in four thy five hundred. Does this mean
you shouldn't use a car seat on an airplane. No.
If you want to go ahead, and there may be
other reasons to do so, but making a good decision
about trade offs here does require actually understanding the size
of the risk. How to conceptualize risk. Risk is not
(05:46):
intuitive to people, even for people who do this as
their job. It's not something our brains naturally get, which
means you need to actively find approaches that work for
you to turn probably into something concrete that you can understand.
The two approaches I like the best other common comparisons
(06:08):
and a conversion to time. First other comparisons. A simple
way to think about risk is to ask what other
events occur with this probability. It's not an exact science,
but we can often get some context for probabilities. For example,
one in two hundred and fifty thousand is on the
(06:29):
lower end of the estimated risk of being killed by
a meteorite. A related form of this comparison is to
take some risk that you do feel comfortable understanding, like
the risk of car accidents, and use it as a benchmark.
A second option time. This is my go to convert
risks into time, as in, if I took this risk
(06:53):
every single day, how long would it take before I
would expect the event to happen once. For something with
a risk of one in ten, you'd expect it about
every ten days. For a risk of one in one hundreds,
more like every three months, one in a thousand, every
three years. For comparisons like one in one thousand versus
(07:13):
one in five thousand, that's every three years versus every
fifteen years, and those feel, at least to me very different.
Note a daily risk of one in two hundred and
fifty thousand translates to once every six hundred and eighty
four years. Bottom line on risk. A lot of panic
(07:34):
ensues when we do not correctly conceptualize risks, especially when
they are small. The first step is to discipline your
risk thinking living with uncertainty. Although we often use them interchangeably,
(07:56):
risk and uncertainty are different. Risk means a defined chance
of something happening or not. You may be uncertain about
which outcome will occur, but you are certain about the
possible outcomes and their probabilities of happening. Uncertainty, at least
formally to an economist, means we do not even know
(08:18):
the probabilities that we're facing, and sometimes we don't know
what the possible outcomes are. With uncertainty, we often cannot
even get our heads around what we are facing, and
that's a bigger challenge than understanding probabilities. A great example
of a panic headline driven by uncertainty was Costco sued
(08:38):
for toxic chemicals in its baby wipes. The story behind
this is a class action suit that claims two high
levels of the forever chemical p fas were found in
a widely used Costco brand of baby wipes. This headline
has uncertainty on many levels. It's not clear to what
degree we should be worried about pfas in general, what
(09:00):
the risks are, how large they are. It's not clear
what the levels are in the wipes. It's not clear
how much the wipes would actually transfer p fast to
a baby. In the absence of these answers, we fill
in with often worst case scenarios. It's easy to think
this must be serious. It's a lawsuit, though it's worth
(09:20):
remembering that there are a lot of reasons to file
class action lawsuits, and these same filers have other ongoing
lawsuits against Costco. Precisely because there is so much uncertainty,
we cannot put these fears to rest with facts or logic.
Thinking about it more will not help. A similar case
(09:42):
can be made for many of the headlines we see
about screen time for little kids. You read something like
screen time linked to developmental delays, and there are a
million questions what kind of delays? There's no clear way
to translate many of the metrics in these papers into
real world outcomes, for which chill. Most of these studies
have heterogeneity across kids, what kind of screens? That's almost
(10:05):
never measured, And then people like me come along and
tell you, hey, actually, those studies just show correlation, not causation.
It's entirely possible that there's literally no effect at all
at anyone, but we can't know for sure because the
study is enabled to show us. It's uncertainty piled on uncertainty.
(10:28):
Unlike with risk, there aren't good tools for unpacking uncertainty.
As noted, thinking more will not help. What we may
have are tools for disciplining our interactions with these problems.
A first tool. Remember that in nearly all of these cases,
all of the ones that come to mind, like ultra
processed foods, microplastics, p fast screen time, the risks we
(10:52):
are talking about are definitely small if screen time caused
enormous developmental delays in most children, or even a small share,
we would likely know it small is than a number.
But I do think it's useful to keep in perspective
that a bag of Dorito's, or an Apple sauce pouch,
or a brand of wipes, or even an hour a
day of television is extremely unlikely to matter much in
(11:16):
the grand scheme of things. A second tool ask yourself, what,
if anything, can I do about this, and how hard
would it be to do it? Sometimes there is an
easy change that can remove the fears. If there is
another equal priced brand of wipes that you're indifferent about,
you may as well switch. Often though there really isn't
(11:38):
anything realistic you can do. Think of et panic headlines about, say,
microplastics in the water supply. Moving away from the municipal
water supply is not a feasible option for most of us.
We can advocate and vote for more water supply regulations,
but at the end of the day, we have to
realize that right now, this is a risk we have
to live with. Understand that this may sound callous and defeatist,
(12:03):
but spiraling anxiety doesn't actually help fix any problems. The
hardest cases are ones where there is something you could
change but it would make other things worse. You could
quit screen time cold turkey, but it would make your
life much harder and mean more frustration with your kids.
You could switch wipes, but it would cost more and
your kid would like them less, making diaper changes less fun,
(12:25):
and eating into funds they could be used for other things.
I would offer you the mantra. People face trade offs.
No option is perfect or without downsides. You have to
pick one and move forward. Ultimately, this is about living
with uncertainty. You will almost certainly never know whether you
(12:45):
made the right choice in any of these many many situations.
Often all we can do is embrace the uncertainty and
try to move on.
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