David Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…Here are all the questions I want to ask you about your work. To start, why does education predict health above and beyond its ability to predict health behaviors and to predict income? One of the great — I was going to say great mysteries, but one of the most important things that we’ve observed about the world is that people who are better educated are in better health. That’s true virtually systematically, and it’s increasingly so over time. That is, the gap between people with a college degree and people without a college degree is growing over time, even as other gaps, for example, between whites and Blacks, are shrinking over time. There are a few different things that are going on at the instrumental level in the sense of what that affects health is happening. Health behaviors are a part of it — things like smoking and obesity. So are things like environmental exposure, so exposure to pollution is lower for higher-SES [socioeconomic status] people, both by where they live in the country, and even within a city by where they live. Stress levels seem to generally be lower for higher-SES people relative to lower-SES people, and chronic stress has a variety of adverse health impacts. Access to medical care is better for people in higher socioeconomic groups relative to lower socioeconomic groups. All of those contribute. If you step back even before those, it’s, I think, a setting where society has really made it much easier for high-income, high-SES people to be able to engage in the types of things and buy the types of things that are associated with improved health. The nature of life, the nature of where people live, the nature of education, the nature of everything is such that it’s easier for higher-income people, higher-SES people to do well, and that, as I said, unfortunately, is increasingly so. But even if we adjust for that, education seems to matter a lot. It’s also puzzling to me — in your own work, it matters more at younger ages. You would think the returns are cumulative: it would really pay off when you’re 67 because you’ve invested in a stock portfolio for decades, but it matters most when you’re young. What’s your best micro account of that?…

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