David Cutler

David Matthew Cutler (born June 22, 1965) is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He was given a five-year term appointment of Harvard College Professor, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching. He holds a joint appointment in the economics department and in Harvards Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard School of Public Health, is a faculty member for the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and serves as commissioner on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission.Cutler graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, with a degree in Economics, and then joined the Harvard faculty after receiving his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. He served in the administration of Bill Clinton and was the senior health care advisor to Barack Obama. From 2003 to 2008, Cutler was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences.While his work on health economics covers a broad range of subtopics, he is particularly notable for his work on the value of the health care system as a whole. Much of his work argues that the United States has realized good bang for its buck by any reasonable measure of the value of a statistical year of life in good health: health care there is extremely expensive, but Americans also place a very high value on documentable health gains. He also argues that they could gain considerably more health for the dollar if reimbursement for care were tied to the health value of the service instead of the intensity of the service.His book Your Money or Your Life gives an introduction on the US health care system. The book and Cutlers ideas were the subject of an article in the New York Times Magazine, The Quality Cure. Professor Cutler published a book with the same title in 2014 which details how Focusing on Health Care Quality Can Save Your Life and Lower Spending Too.Cutlers 2003 study Why have Americans become more obese? discusses rising obesity as an outcome of the revolution in mass food packaging. He includes vacuum packing, improved preservatives, deep freezing, and microwaves as culprits. Consumer prices on items like various frozen foods, soda, and potato chips are increasing at half the rate of fresh fruits and vegetables, and mass preparation makes for lower costs and more food consumption.Calories expended, however, changed little. Accordingly, Cutler posits that the 20 min average reduced time of food preparation has resulted in an average increase of 100 Cal per day per individual. The extra 100 Cal can largely account for a weight gain of 10-12 lb in the American population over the past 20 years.

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