The demand for health, 30 years later: a very personal retrospective and prospective reflection

摘要

This symposium and the American Economic Association/International Health Economics Association roundtable on which it is based would have shocked my late father. A little more than 30 years ago he phoned me about an editorial in a magazine that he received each week. The magazine was called Financial World: America's Investment and Business Weekly. The 13 December 1972 issue had an extremely critical editorial on my National Bureau of Economic Research monograph The Demand for Health: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation (Grossman, 1972b). The thrust of the editorial was that it was foolish to talk about people choosing their level of health. My father was quite upset over its negative tone. I told him: "Dad, bad publicity is always better than no publicity at all." I think that most professional economists find that their education never ceases. Mine certainly never does, and I want to acknowledge the contributions that the participants in this symposium have made to my education as an economist. John Mullahy began to work on the demand for cigarettes in the context of models of addiction before I did (Mullahy, 1985) and has made seminal contributions to the literature on the effects of alcohol abuse and mental health problems on labor market outcomes (for example, Mullahy and Sindelar, 1990, 1993). More recently, his penetrating development of the two-part model and its extensions (Mullahy, 1998; Manning and Mullahy, 2001) has added "mullit" to tobit and heckit as tools that all Ph.D. students in economics must learn. John also puts up with and answers all of my somewhat naive econometrics questions in a prompt manner.