David Cutler: preference

Transcript context

…You’ve written some of the best-known papers on obesity and put forward the hypothesis that rising obesity is due, in part, to food preparation being quicker and easier. If that’s true, why don’t diets work better? Because food preparation lowers the relative price of eating, but if you just target the quantity directly by dieting, it seems that most people don’t lose weight by dieting. It would be odd for the price to matter but the quantity not to matter. I have puzzled over this a lot. What I think is happening is that it plays into our inability to delay gratification for periods of time. What people say, including myself very frequently, is “I’m going to start dieting and exercising tomorrow or next week. ” If I really am going to start dieting and exercising next week, then it really doesn’t matter what I eat this week because everything will be fine. The difficulty is that next week, I’ll say the same thing about the following week. People have a very short-term horizon where they have difficulty understanding that if I don’t do it this week, I’m not going to do it next week, and then I’m not going to do it the following week. We could take all the time we’ve saved on food preparation and cleaning. We could devote some of that time to exercising. We could work off the additional calories and still have time left over. As a society, we could do that, but we don’t do that, I think, in part, because every week we say, “Yes, I’m going to start that next week.” Why is obesity such a big problem in rural Mexico, say, Chiapas? I mean, we know why — they drink too much Coca-Cola. But structurally, why is that the case in terms of relative prices?…

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