David Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…In 2006, you wrote a famous paper, “Why Americans Smoke Less.” You argue it’s because they better understand the health effects of smoking. Since 2006, anecdotally, I observe Western Europeans smoke much less than they used to. Is that because they’ve acquired a similar understanding? Or for other reasons? You started this off in one of the most amazing places, which is that, 40 years after the US surgeon general conclusively demonstrated that smoking was bad for you, and 50 years after it really was known that smoking was bad for you, Americans had cut smoking in half, and people in Western European countries had not. How can that persist? It’s not that in Germany they had no idea that smoking was bad for you, and so on, or in France or anything. But in part, it’s the social norms and the peer-type influences, and that shows up through public policy as well. In the US, we have periodically raised taxes on cigarettes. We have put in restrictions where you cannot smoke inside buildings, you can’t smoke in public places. All of that discourages smoking a lot. Smoking is also a social activity, so if your friends are smoking, and you don’t have restrictions on where you can smoke, then people are more likely to start smoking and continue smoking. Smoking, even though it’s a sort of individual act, it displays a lot of these external consequences, these external effects, and they hit very much sooner in the US than in other countries. That is, people in the US really responded quite rapidly, and it took people in other countries a longer period of time. For that matter, it also took, for example, youth in the US a longer period of time. If you look, youth smoking was rising through the 1990s until the late 1990s, with the Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco companies and the states. And all of a sudden all this information came out about how the tobacco companies were lying to people, and they were pretending that they didn’t know smoking was bad, even though they knew smoking was bad. That just turned off so many people — particularly younger people — that youth smoking has begun a two- to three-decade decline since then. You can have the peer effects, if you will, writ large. Information can be ongoing and have huge impacts. And I think that’s what we’re picking up between the US and other countries. 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?…

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