Astral Codex Ten

European countries

7 min read

European countries

Article

European countries is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 07, 2021 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “In most European countries, which had lockdowns early”; “They look at European countries during the first wave of COVID”; “European countries get their drugs relatively inexpensively”. It most often appears alongside China, Europe, France.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: July 07, 2021
  • Last seen: July 01, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
How common was this trend? It’s hard to say, because most governments started panicking around mid-March and instituting lockdown orders then, and most individuals started panicking around mid-March and making their voluntary behavior changes then, and in most places it’s really hard to figure out which of these things happened a day or two before the other. In most European countries, which had lockdowns early, there wasn’t much behavior change before lockdown orders; in some developing countries, which had lockdowns late, there was a lot of behavior change before lockdowns.
Inline links: developing countries
Probably the most-cited study (1177 times!) on the effect of lockdowns is Flaxman et al from mid-2020. They look at European countries during the first wave of COVID in March 2020, when they instituted various policies, and how that affected virus transmission. They find that nothing except mandatory lockdown (which I think they’re using to mean full shelter-in-place orders) did anything, mandatory lockdown was extremely effective, and that lockdowns saved about three million lives.
Inline links: Flaxman et al
Sweden famously did not lock down as strictly as some other European countries at the beginning of the pandemic. How did it do?
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
One of the other major differences between the US healthcare system and the EU systems is that the European Commission does drug approvals for all of the EU (and there are other EU-wide paths to getting drugs approved, with approval by any regulatory body being sufficient for the drug to be approved); whereas, the FDA does approvals for just the US (and it doesn't compete with any other US regulators to do the approvals). This gives individual European countries much more leverage than the US would have for negotiating with drug manufacturers. Since most of the cost of drug manufacturing is the research, trials, and approval process, Norway (technically a non-EU member of the EEA, but they still accept approvals given by the European Commission) can offer drugmakers relatively low prices and still have them sell their drugs there because they're already going through the European Commission approval process to sell their drugs in the rest of Europe. If the USA starts setting drug prices particularly low, it will have a much bigger impact on the incentive to fund drug trials through the FDA approval process. This also changes the optics dramatically. There's not going to be a scandal over a drugmaker failing to push their drugs through the approval process the same way there would be over it refusing to sell drugs to a particular country where those drugs are approved. (And I think it's generally accepted that the FDA's process is slower, more stringent, and more expensive than Europe's.)
And we end up with a system where drug development is worthwhile if and only if those drugs end up being sold in the United States, and where the FDA has the most stringent approval process, and nobody really has an incentive to change this. American regulators and politicians get disproportionately more power out of this arrangement. Drug companies make their profits. American insurers are able to pass along and distribute the costs across the population so they make their profits too. European countries get their drugs relatively inexpensively, and are existing in a legal context where that is their only real incentives since they really can't increase their ability to regulate drugs because the power that exists there is distributed throughout the EU rather than possessed by the governments of the member states. And the members of the EC probably are a bit unhappy and trying to increase their own ability to regulate things, but they're sufficiently disconnected from the powers of the member states that what they want doesn't really matter. (So Europe has somehow found a way to make the people who have the most incentive to increase the price of drug R&D there from having their voices heard.)
Relatedly, another thing that is always missing from discussions of healthcare spending is the extent to which Europe and Canada freeload on the rest of the world for medical research. Below are the total medical R&D expenses by country for years for which I could easily find data. The key takeaway is that even though US GDP is only 13x Canada's in 2018, US medical research spending was approximately 45x theirs. US GDP is only about 20% bigger than Europe's, but the US spent significantly more than 2x on medical research than they do; (and as far as I can tell from less complete data sources the disparity is growing).
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
European countries constantly fought for and won territory both within Europe and throughout the world during the 18th and 19th centuries. The US, too, started doing so almost as soon as it existed. For example, in 1847 the US acquired territory from Mexico through conquest, in a war started officially because of unpaid debts.
Within our modern framework, none of this makes sense. It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided this was a good excuse to conquer Europe, while everyone else reacted with horror that they could think such a thing. It was a good excuse to conquer Europe, but leaders of countries in Europe took many things to be good excuses to conquer Europe, and Europe generally went along with that, because the rules were fair. It was just a natural chain reaction to the fact that countries used war as a tool of diplomacy. Within the old frame, we can see that the Allies treated Germany not as a villain, but as a defeated foe, and before the Pact, when you defeated your foe in war, you made them pay tribute in territory, concessions, and money.
In defending the Pact's place in the tier of first-class important events of the 20th century, H&S also document some of the intellectual history of evolving expectations and norms about war. These norms were driven from Europe, perhaps because of a combination of globalization and near-continuous intra-Europe conflict that co-occurred with the Enlightenment and the need to document philosophical underpinnings for everything.