Two Health Economists Walk into a Bar: What bothered me in that conversation of Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster

Last week I was at a conference on enhancing scientific integrity (as I reported here), and one of the sessions was an interview of Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of the National Institutes of Health, and Emily Oster, a professor of economics and Brown University. I referred to that session in a post the other day regarding the recent case of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was pulled by Bhattacharya, in his additional capacity as acting director of the CDC. I’ll get back to that story in a bit, but here I wanted to talk about some larger things that bothered me in the interview. Before getting to my disagreements, let me give my positive take, which is that both the people in the interview had an air of moral seriousness. This is important. So much of the discourse in politics and social science these days is polluted with cynicism, whether it be from history professor Niall Ferguson decrying the “wokeness” on college campuses when he’s not…