The Relationship Between Birth Weight and Health

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There's always the issue that if you have lower birth weight because you're a smoker, it may not be as bad as if you naturally would haveLower birth weight or lower birth weight. I don't know why that is, by the way. Very low birth weights are associated with additional problems, typically very early on. And so, and that can mean that lungs are undeveloped and so on. So certainly there are there are ranges of healthy birth weights, which include quite low. Some babies are like great born at five pounds,. But it's correlated, I think, because it's a marker for these other things.

Emily Oster of the University of Chicago and author of Expecting Better talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book on pregnancy and the challenges of decision-making under uncertainty. Oster argues that many of the standard behavioral prescriptions for pregnant women are not supported by the medical literature. The conversation centers around the general issue of interpreting medical evidence in a complex world using pregnancy advice as an application. Alcohol, caffeine, cats, gardening and deli-meats and their effect on pregnant women are some of the examples that come up. The conversation closes with a discussion of Oster's work on hepatitis-B and the male-female birth ratio.