David Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…What do you make of the Latino life expectancy paradox? Latino immigrants come to the US, often not speaking English, not well connected at all. They often outlive people who are born here, but their descendants do less well. You’re presupposing that it’s about the people not being well equipped to handle ordinary America, but Latinos seem to show the opposite trend. First off, there’s a little bit of selection in terms of the Latino immigrants, but in part, also they bring behaviors that are typically from the countries where they are from. Then second generation will be more like Americans and so on, in terms of smoking and obesity and a variety of adverse behaviors like that. I think that the closer you get to native Americans, the more you look like native American health issues. Then there’s a mix, depending on the health behaviors that one brings from the country where you are from, some of which are favorable, some of which are less favorable. 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.…

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