| Popis: |
In this chapter we use micro economic models of individual behavior in a dynamic context to describe how an individual chooses the optimal level of investment in healthiness and implicitly length of life. This establishes a foundation for the estimation of structural parameters related to health demands for older adult men in Section 2.4 and for the hazard mortality estimates that we present in Chapters 4 and 5. While choice regarding health may be considered commonplace for economists, characterizing the length of life as a choice may seem crude and unreasonable to some. There are, however, numerous examples of people making this choice directly, e.g., suicides, living wills that mandate against extraordinary medical care, the refusal by Christian Scientists of potentially life-preserving medical care, and the shortfall of deaths before personally significant dates with a subsequent spike in death rates afterwards.4 Moreover, people have cut back on cigarette smoking since the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the morbidity and mortality implications of smoking. They also have to be paid more to work at jobs at which more deaths occur (see Thaler and Rosen, 1975). More to the point, by constantly making choices that affect their health and thus the probability that their health falls irreversibly below some threshold leading to death, individuals constantly are affecting their expected duration of survival — whether or not they characterize these choices as proximate causes of survival. |
