The way I see it (I live in the UK) is that most western European governments are able to respond to a sufficiently unambiguous warning from experts that disaster is coming within a month if we carry on as normal, and react strongly to that warning, but not much more. That’s why we get blunt instruments like local lockdowns and a slow-to-scale contact tracing system that could easily be made to work with, say 20 times its current budget.
That’s because the Morituri Nolumus Mori effect applies everywhere, but has to combine with some basic collective ability to perceive physical facts to work properly, as you say and I argued in that post.
The MNM effect is what we credit instead of clever planning or reasoning, for why things aren’t as bad as they could be—the differences between e.g. America and Germany are due to any level of planning at all
I think the extreme version of your ‘no ability to perceive physical facts’ claim applies to some US states, the US federal government and maybe Brazil and the various developing countries that just don’t have good enough information flow for people to stay informed, but doesn’t apply to Europe, let alone East Asia.
But I strongly suspect that when things do get New York-bad in those other states, we will see individual and state responses trying to keep in under control that will bring the R back to near-1, even if it seems hopeless right now.
The Morituri Nolumus Mori effect, as a reminder, is the thesis that governments and individuals have a consistent, short-term reaction to danger which is stronger than many of us suspected, though not sustainable in the absence of an imminent threat. This effect is just such a hard limit—it can’t do very much except work as a stronger than expected brake. And something like it has been proposed as an explanation, not just by me two months ago but by Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, for why we have already avoided the worst disasters. Here’s Toby’s recent interview:
The way I see it (I live in the UK) is that most western European governments are able to respond to a sufficiently unambiguous warning from experts that disaster is coming within a month if we carry on as normal, and react strongly to that warning, but not much more. That’s why we get blunt instruments like local lockdowns and a slow-to-scale contact tracing system that could easily be made to work with, say 20 times its current budget.
That’s because the Morituri Nolumus Mori effect applies everywhere, but has to combine with some basic collective ability to perceive physical facts to work properly, as you say and I argued in that post.
I think the extreme version of your ‘no ability to perceive physical facts’ claim applies to some US states, the US federal government and maybe Brazil and the various developing countries that just don’t have good enough information flow for people to stay informed, but doesn’t apply to Europe, let alone East Asia.
But I strongly suspect that when things do get New York-bad in those other states, we will see individual and state responses trying to keep in under control that will bring the R back to near-1, even if it seems hopeless right now.