David Cutler: evaluation

Transcript context

…Turning to your book with Ed, which again, is Survival of the City, just coming out — putting aside anti-COVID measures, which we’re all familiar with, how can cities be made less contagious for disease in America? We learned a couple of things about cities and contagiousness of disease. One is that poor health anywhere is poor health everywhere. I may be totally selfish. Go back to when you endowed me with a lot of income. I may care only about myself. Until a couple of years ago, that meant I didn’t have to care about the health of people in poorer parts of Boston. Of course, I do care about them, but continuing the analogy, now I really have to care about them. I have to worry a lot, are people obese? Because obesity is associated with the spread of COVID-19. Are people smoking? Because smoking will predispose to other types of illnesses. Are people IV drug users? Because that’s going to spread HIV, and that’s going to mean that heroin is all over, and so my kids are going to be exposed to it in school, and so on. Are people using electronic cigarettes? All of a sudden, I have to worry about all of that. I think that has enormous implications for public policy in terms of what public policy needs to think about. I also think that it changes the conversation from when we think of medical care as being, what’s my policy towards doctors, and what’s my policy towards hospitals, and so on. We need to reinvigorate more of the public health infrastructure. What’s happened over time is that as infectious disease has declined, we’ve spent less and less money and less and less attention on the public health system until, basically, parts of it collapsed in COVID, and we realized, “Oh my God, it’s a bad idea to have a nonfunctioning public health system. ” So we’re going to have to rebuild that, and that’s going to mean a lot more money, but that’s going to be essential in reducing the spread of infectious diseases. What’s wrong with, say, the CDC? Their budget in real terms has gone up quite a bit. This morning — the day we’re recording — they issued a warning to Americans not to travel to Canada, which is literally insane. It’s the Biden administration now for some time. I’m broadly libertarian, skeptical about government — even I was shocked when that happened. What’s the model that explains how something like that can come about?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.