The scales have fallen from Emily Oster’s eyes. She is a standing desk convert.

When I am not evangelizing about cash transfer programs, I am pushing the standing desk on my friends, colleagues and blog readers. My standing desk conversion story, comments and reviews here.

Oster makes a similar case, but where I provide opinion and pictures of animals I stole off the Internet, she opts for giving actual evidence. Some excerpts:

• …prolonged standing is associated with varicose veins and lower back pain.
• …The combination of sitting and standing provided by such a desk seems to decrease worker-reported discomfort rather than increase it.
• …Workers who use these desks report small reductions in back, neck and arm pain.
• …[T]hese improvements do not seem to come at the cost of lower worker productivity.
• …[People] don’t typically stand all day. The decrease in sitting time is on the order of 90 minutes to two hours.
• …[One study showed] a 65 percent increase in mortality rate for [Norwegians] who sat for 10 or more hours a day compared with those who sat less than four hours a day.
• …A large Australian study found a 40 percent increase in the risk of death from sitting more than 11 hours a day versus less than four.
• …[A]t least one review article shows there does not seem to be any evidence of extra energy spent by the users of standing desks.

For those bored on a Friday afternoon, all my previous standing desk posts here.