Is there a good cost-benefit analysis of Brexit in the post-COVID era? The last conversation I saw about this was in February 4 2021:
Rob Wiblin:
The UK vaccination program has been so good — from planning to strategy to implementation.
Mad respect for these folks.
Jai Dhyani:
The UK’s vaccination campaign has been so good and the EU ’s so bad that I’m seriously reconsidering my position on Brexit. I don’t know how things went in the universe where Brexit didn’t happen, but the contrast is so stark it’s hard to imagine that getting the EU out of the way didn’t help a lot.
Chris Watkins:
This is one of the few things they’ve done well, though.
Jai Dhyani:
It’s a really big thing though! Ending a pandemic faster, and consequently saving hundreds of thousands of QALYs *and* spinning up the economy months earlier than they counterfactually could have probably outweighs even a pretty long list of Brexit downsides.
Robert Rand:
Also, probably slowed the spread of the UK variant.
But yeah, looking at the EU beaurocracy trying to deal with the desperate need for vaccines had left me flabbergasted and way more pro-brexit. (Though equally anti the brexiteers.)
Jeffrey Eldred:
My understanding is that EU nations still had to opt into the EU vaccination plan. So a non-Brexit UK still could have chosen to go ahead with their planned vaccination (especially with the strength of their NHS system).
However, I think it’s still true that the failure of the EU vaccination program should reflect negatively on EU bureaucracy more broadly.
On this I would note that the Remain campaign within the UK has always had a tenor of “We know that the EU has many things wrong with it, but leaving doesn’t really help”. It’s only the US perspective (and some in continental Europe) that argued the EU is actually a great organization.
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Seems like a key crux on Brexit if so. Does anybody know of a case where an EU country didn’t opt in? (Also, diff between “opt in” vs “not opt out”.)
My understanding is that EU broadly has worked together on this. For instance, there was a EU-wide process for approval of the vaccines—and they have been approved much later than in the UK.
Overall I do think this is a point on favour of Brexit.
Jacob Funnell:
I’d point out there are other consequences of Brexit that may point in the other direction in a massive way. For example, the potential for the UK’s farmed animal welfare standards to be gutted in a trade deal with the US could outweigh this by itself.
It depends on a lot of calls, but I think we’re mostly very familiar with covid at this point; whereas comparatively fewer of us have looked at the minutiae of what happens for animals.
I understand that i) pointing out the efficiency of vaccination isn’t an argument for Brexit ii) policy debates aren’t one sided.
But it still seems worth contextualizing these kinds of claims in case it seems likely to someone that this is the only potential “really morally important consequence of Brexit” in the room. It’s not.
Johanna Maria Kirss:
Smaller European countries, especially the ones near Russia, place great value on the unity of EU because of security concerns. It’s conflicting to feel let down by an institution I’ve been taught is one of the few things keeping my country safe from foreign threat.
Jai Dhyani:
@Johanna Maria Kirss It can be both an important geopolitical alliance and extremely ineffective bureaucracy.
Oliver Habryka:
After seeing all the evidence of the pandemic over the last year, I overall think Brexit was quite good for the world, and updated also a bunch on Cummings having good taste.
I think it’s somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about “post-COVID” impacts when we’re probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally. At the same time, while I don’t think there is a clear answer, the consensus of economists seems to be that overall Brexit was clearly bad, as of January this year, i.e. mid-pandemic.
Next, the UK going alone on vaccination, which probably would have been possible even without Brexit, seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom. But even if it was mentioned, I think it’s strange to defend the impacts of Brexit on the basis of a difficult to explore counterfactual understanding of how the UK would have behaved differently during this tail event, ignoring the consensus that the impact on the economic situation was very negative.
I think it’s somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about “post-COVID” impacts when we’re probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally.
I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality—by “post-COVID” I meant “the world after COVID first shows up” rather than “the world after COVID goes away”. :)
seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Would this have gone any differently if they’d been in the EU? I’m mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK’s overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings’ track record! I guess I’d just want to note the change in scope.)
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.
What was Cummings’ stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:
BAGEHOT: Turning to the case for Brexit, what is it about the EU that you think makes it an inadequate form of governance and international co-operation in 2016, 2030, 2050?
DOMINIC CUMMINGS: In no order of priority… there is an obvious problem with democratic legitimacy (which the pro-EU people accept) if you have democratic accountability working at a national level, but a large and very important set of rules being set at a supranational level. People may accept that if they think that this new system is obviously much more effective and beneficial. But it isn’t. There are huge problems with how the EU system works. It is extraordinarily opaque, extraordinarily slow, extraordinarily bureaucratic, extraordinarily wasteful. And the advantages are very hard to quantify. I’ll give a specific example. Everyone holds up the Single Market as a wonderful thing without usually realising what it is. A rule brought in under the Single Market a decade or so ago was the Clinical Trials Directive. This regulates how the testing of drugs, including cancer drugs, operates in this country. There is no rationale whatsoever why, from the point of view of international trade, how a country organises the testing of cancer drugs should be an issue for supranational regulation.
BAGEHOT: It makes it easier to sell those drugs to a wider market of consumers.
DOMINIC CUMMINGS: No, it does not. In fact, what it has done is, as Nobel scientists and all sorts of people have said, massively slow down the process of testing and people have died unnecessarily as a result. The problem here is two-fold. It’s not just that the rule is stupid and in a rational world you wouldn’t have it. It’s that the process of changing it is almost impossible—and we still haven’t managed to do so. It’s been there now for over ten years. It is still causing trouble. The amended version comes into effect shortly. It still has all sorts of stupidities in it. Britain, left to its own devices, certainly would not do that. There’s a whole set of other examples. If two people sitting on a Shetland island want to sell olive oil to each other, the EU says they can’t sell it in containers of more than five litres. What on earth is the point of that? It’s totally pointless and saying “if we minus ourselves from rules like that, that’s somehow going to destroy jobs” is a non-sequitur. It does not follow on any sane view of economics.
This relates to a broader argument. If you look back on the long sweep of history, one of the big arguments about post-renaissance China and post-renaissance Europe concerns regulatory harmonisation. Post-renaissance China essentially harmonised the entire empire. Everyone had to do the same thing. In Europe we had a completely different system. We had regulatory competition so when, for example, the central Chinese government said “we’re not going to have any explorers, we’re going to get rid of our fleet”, that’s what happened. In Europe when explorers were told “we’re not going to fund you to go out and do that”, they went to another country and got funding from someone else.
This makes it sound to me like the vaccination case is a central example of the kind of thing Cummings wanted to change via Brexit.
First, I think that even understanding “post-covid” as now, it’s early to look at the overall impacts—and again, see the linked survey. Economists still think this was overall a mistake, from that perspective at least.
Second, as I said in a different response, the reasoning seems to be the claim that they wanted to take back, to slightly paraphrase from memory, “their money, their borders, and their laws”—and yes, laws definitely includes the sort of policy choice he’s pointing to, but it wouldn’t have needed to slow their early purchase nor their excellent distribution system (which would perhaps have been a couple weeks later due to the vaccine approval delay, which they likely could have pushed forward, but given how slowly they started to arrive, this would have made at most a small difference in vaccine timing for most people,) but the other two claims came first, and seemed like the central parts of the question.
I think it’s somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about “post-COVID” impacts when we’re probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally.
To the extend that this is unreasonable it’s very unreasonable to say that you know the post-Brexit effects yourself.
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.
What do you think “take back control” means when it’s not about policy freedom and escaping bureaucracy from Brussels?
I didn’t claim to know all of the post Brexit effects, I linked to a survey of economists. But I don’t think I need to defend the claim that Brexit was damaging.
And when asked about what they were taking back control of, I recall that the leaders pushing for Brexit said they wanted control of their money, their borders, and their laws. Only the last of those is plausibly what you meant—the first is a weird misunderstanding about where money came from and went, and the second is about disliking immigration.
A good portion of EU money gets spend back in the countries but that money often gets spend poorly.
To give one example from where I live in Berlin, Spandau is one of the districts of Berlin. Out of one EU fund Spandau got money to make a tourism plan and now calls itself Zitadellenstadt Spandau. The name refers to the Zitadelle which is a castle in Spandau that wasn’t bombed during WWII likely because it stored chemical weapons that the allies fortunately didn’t want to have released.
Without the EU we would have never spent that money for that tourism marketing exercise. It happens frequently that EU-funded projects are those that local don’t really think they need. Taking control over EU money means being able to direct such money better to our priorities. Grain-subsidies are similar. Most UK or German citizens would want an agricultural policy that actually promotes healthy food and not the crap we are having. The EU is setup that it’s nearly impossible to update the agricultural policy in a sensible way. Control about money means actually being able to spend that more wisely.
A good portion of politically informed people in the UK will know stories about how EU money that flows back to the UK is spent in pointless ways.
On a topic like animal rights, we Germans don’t want male chickens to be shreddered. Without the EU we would simply outlaw it and be okay with our eggs costing 5% more. We didn’t do that because in our supermarket German produced eggs would have to compete with Polnish eggs and we think that it would be unfair for our farmers to increase their production cost by 5%. If we could do that then the technology to identify the gender of the eggs would be developed much faster then it currently happens. Instead of just outlawing it, we said that some years into the future we will outlaw it when hopefully the cost came down. The EU rules also prevent US from simply paying our farmers the 5% as a subsidy.
In practice the single market rules mean that technology to prevent male chickens from being shreddered gets developed slower then it otherwise would.
Now, the average voting citizens doesn’t know in detail that “take back control” couldn’t tell you in detail about the effects of this. They have a vague sense that they want back control and have weird misconceptions. Misconceptions exists on both sides.
Economists as a class generally don’t do a good job at explaining how to create new innovation and I doubt that most of the surveyed economists understand that the single market prevents faster development of new technology to prevent male chickens from being shreddered.
Now, we Germans think that the pro’s of the EU outweigh the disadvantages that we can’t advance animal rights in German as fast as we would otherwise. In the UK plenty of people see things differently. They want the policy freedom to allow new innovation. Now, the UK cares less about protecting male chickens from being shreddered but they care about vaccines being developed faster in a future pandemic and thus pushed for human challenge studies. Human challenge studies wouldn’t be something we Germans would do and there’s likely plenty of other EU opposition as well that prevents the EMA rules from changing.
Things like that are the concrete thing that control about money and law means. It produces some value by allowing the government to allow certain kinds of innovation to happen. Of course for that to happen you actually need decent governmental policies. It’s very hard to estimate the size of the benefits of allowing more innovation that’s currently blocked by byzantine regulations.
Yes, there are downsides to bureaucracy—but I’m entirely unconvinced that the UK has reduced the number of downsides via Brexit. It seems more like they traded one set for a larger and more expensive set of bureaucratic problems both internally, and interacting with the EU. Finding a single example which turned out (very) well, like vaccine distribution—which would likely have been possible even if they had been EU members—doesn’t really seem like a convincing pitch, even if it’s true that it was only possible because they left.
FWIW, I personally don’t have much evidence to determine whether Brexit was good. Seems plausible to me that you’re right that they now just have different bureaucratic downsides. I’ve read a few things about being able to make ARIA (UK version of ARPA) and some other things from 2019 that make me lean somewhat positive, but I’m extremely agnostic. I have a bunch of thoughts on quality of evidence here, but suffice it to say I am not sure whether we will ever get much Bayesian evidence on goodness or badness. So my interest in DC is relatively orthogonal to whether Brexit turns out to be object-level good or bad (even though ideally I would know this and be able to include it in my model of how much to believe his beliefs).
I agree that evidence is weak, but I think it will be much clearer in the future whether it was a mistake—and the pathways for it to have been good are different than for it to have been bad.
Two concrete things that would be strong evidence either way which we’d see in the next 5 years: - Significant divergence from previous economic trajectory that differs from changes in the EU. - UK choosing to rejoin the EU due to domestic pressure, or general public agreement that it was good.
Perhaps more likely, we see a mix of evidence, and we conclude that like most complex policy decisions, it will take an additional decade or two for a consensus of economists and historians to emerge so we clearly see what the impact was.
That said, I would be very happy to bet at even odds about it resolving as a clear negative—albeit with a very long resolution time frame, needing a somewhat qualitative resolution criteria.
Not sure why you think domestic pressure / public agreement is strong evidence. Public pressure for all sorts of things seems hardly correlated with whether they’re beneficial.
I think the strongest arguments for Brexit are pretty orthogonal to the economy. Things like “can the government react to crises on the order of weeks instead of months”. I do think enough crises would give us data on this but I’m not even sure it will be reasonable to extract counterfactuals from several. Other reasons to do Brexit seem similarly hard to measure compared to myopic economic impact.
I didn’t say “domestic pressure / public agreement is strong evidence,” I said that a reversal of the decision for those reasons would be strong evidence. And yes, I think that a majority of voters agreeing it was so much of a mistake that it is worth it to re-enter on materially worse terms, which it would need to be, would be a clear indication that the original decision was a bad one.
And I’m not sure why you say that a change in the long term trajectory of growth is a myopic criteria. If the principal benefit is better ability to react to crises, given the variety of crises that occur and their frequency, that should be obvious over the course of years, not centuries, and would absolutely affect economic growth over the long term.
Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I’m still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I’m trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there’s then a pandemic that kills a bunch of people and curtails quality of life drastically (just outside the bounds of our growth measurement, arguendo). So, especially as the world gets more and more crazy and plausibly near end-game, I’m willing to trade off increasingly more GDP growth for other things like liberties, nimble government, less-partisan politics, literal political experimentation, etc, that increase quality of life and general or political sanity and decrease likelihood of disasters. I could imagine a world where those things also cashed out immediately in enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but I could also imagine a world where there were ways to get some of these that required real economic sacrifices.
Being first to roll out vaccines is not enough, other European countries have managed to keep more people alive, and created safe environments—mitigations such as masks and clean air being the norm. Covid cases yesterday 13th October, 2021.
Which country do you think has sane clean air policies? To me it feels like one of the most annoying features of German policy making regarding COVID that clean air isn’t given much weight.
Moving to the actual point, there are policies where EU rules interfer and there are policies where EU rules don’t have much of an effect. The way drugs get licensed is one where EU rules matter a lot and thus it relates to the Brexit.
On the other hand I’m not seeing how Brexit has an effect on masks or clean air.
I was responding to an assertion that the UK had done well in dealing with COVID because of the speed of vaccination roll out. The head of the UK’s medicines regulator said that the authorisation for the COVID vaccine was actually permitted under EU law. I believe him.
It is the case that the UK has a very high rate of infection and deaths compared to other similar European countries. Calls for proven, effective mitigations (repeated by Independent Sage) eg mask-wearing, providing safe ventilation in schools and workplaces, and having a Test, Track and Trace system fit for purpose, have been ignored in the UK.
I do not know about Germany’s mitigations in any detail. I am aware of a much lower death and infection rate there (and in France, Italy and Spain) compared to the UK.
Well,not quite ignored...but there were a lot of problems. The first lockdown was too late , PPE wasn’t available, the track and trace system was too late and not good enough..and so on. Attempts were made.
Is there a good cost-benefit analysis of Brexit in the post-COVID era? The last conversation I saw about this was in February 4 2021:
Rob Wiblin:
Jai Dhyani:
Chris Watkins:
Jai Dhyani:
Robert Rand:
Jeffrey Eldred:
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Chana Messinger:
Stefan Schubert:
Jacob Funnell:
Johanna Maria Kirss:
Jai Dhyani:
Oliver Habryka:
I think it’s somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about “post-COVID” impacts when we’re probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally. At the same time, while I don’t think there is a clear answer, the consensus of economists seems to be that overall Brexit was clearly bad, as of January this year, i.e. mid-pandemic.
Next, the UK going alone on vaccination, which probably would have been possible even without Brexit, seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom. But even if it was mentioned, I think it’s strange to defend the impacts of Brexit on the basis of a difficult to explore counterfactual understanding of how the UK would have behaved differently during this tail event, ignoring the consensus that the impact on the economic situation was very negative.
I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality—by “post-COVID” I meant “the world after COVID first shows up” rather than “the world after COVID goes away”. :)
Would this have gone any differently if they’d been in the EU? I’m mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK’s overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings’ track record! I guess I’d just want to note the change in scope.)
What was Cummings’ stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:
This makes it sound to me like the vaccination case is a central example of the kind of thing Cummings wanted to change via Brexit.
First, I think that even understanding “post-covid” as now, it’s early to look at the overall impacts—and again, see the linked survey. Economists still think this was overall a mistake, from that perspective at least.
Second, as I said in a different response, the reasoning seems to be the claim that they wanted to take back, to slightly paraphrase from memory, “their money, their borders, and their laws”—and yes, laws definitely includes the sort of policy choice he’s pointing to, but it wouldn’t have needed to slow their early purchase nor their excellent distribution system (which would perhaps have been a couple weeks later due to the vaccine approval delay, which they likely could have pushed forward, but given how slowly they started to arrive, this would have made at most a small difference in vaccine timing for most people,) but the other two claims came first, and seemed like the central parts of the question.
To the extend that this is unreasonable it’s very unreasonable to say that you know the post-Brexit effects yourself.
What do you think “take back control” means when it’s not about policy freedom and escaping bureaucracy from Brussels?
I didn’t claim to know all of the post Brexit effects, I linked to a survey of economists. But I don’t think I need to defend the claim that Brexit was damaging.
And when asked about what they were taking back control of, I recall that the leaders pushing for Brexit said they wanted control of their money, their borders, and their laws. Only the last of those is plausibly what you meant—the first is a weird misunderstanding about where money came from and went, and the second is about disliking immigration.
A good portion of EU money gets spend back in the countries but that money often gets spend poorly.
To give one example from where I live in Berlin, Spandau is one of the districts of Berlin. Out of one EU fund Spandau got money to make a tourism plan and now calls itself Zitadellenstadt Spandau. The name refers to the Zitadelle which is a castle in Spandau that wasn’t bombed during WWII likely because it stored chemical weapons that the allies fortunately didn’t want to have released.
Without the EU we would have never spent that money for that tourism marketing exercise. It happens frequently that EU-funded projects are those that local don’t really think they need. Taking control over EU money means being able to direct such money better to our priorities. Grain-subsidies are similar. Most UK or German citizens would want an agricultural policy that actually promotes healthy food and not the crap we are having. The EU is setup that it’s nearly impossible to update the agricultural policy in a sensible way. Control about money means actually being able to spend that more wisely.
A good portion of politically informed people in the UK will know stories about how EU money that flows back to the UK is spent in pointless ways.
On a topic like animal rights, we Germans don’t want male chickens to be shreddered. Without the EU we would simply outlaw it and be okay with our eggs costing 5% more. We didn’t do that because in our supermarket German produced eggs would have to compete with Polnish eggs and we think that it would be unfair for our farmers to increase their production cost by 5%. If we could do that then the technology to identify the gender of the eggs would be developed much faster then it currently happens. Instead of just outlawing it, we said that some years into the future we will outlaw it when hopefully the cost came down. The EU rules also prevent US from simply paying our farmers the 5% as a subsidy.
In practice the single market rules mean that technology to prevent male chickens from being shreddered gets developed slower then it otherwise would.
Now, the average voting citizens doesn’t know in detail that “take back control” couldn’t tell you in detail about the effects of this. They have a vague sense that they want back control and have weird misconceptions. Misconceptions exists on both sides.
Economists as a class generally don’t do a good job at explaining how to create new innovation and I doubt that most of the surveyed economists understand that the single market prevents faster development of new technology to prevent male chickens from being shreddered.
Now, we Germans think that the pro’s of the EU outweigh the disadvantages that we can’t advance animal rights in German as fast as we would otherwise. In the UK plenty of people see things differently. They want the policy freedom to allow new innovation. Now, the UK cares less about protecting male chickens from being shreddered but they care about vaccines being developed faster in a future pandemic and thus pushed for human challenge studies. Human challenge studies wouldn’t be something we Germans would do and there’s likely plenty of other EU opposition as well that prevents the EMA rules from changing.
Things like that are the concrete thing that control about money and law means. It produces some value by allowing the government to allow certain kinds of innovation to happen. Of course for that to happen you actually need decent governmental policies. It’s very hard to estimate the size of the benefits of allowing more innovation that’s currently blocked by byzantine regulations.
Yes, there are downsides to bureaucracy—but I’m entirely unconvinced that the UK has reduced the number of downsides via Brexit. It seems more like they traded one set for a larger and more expensive set of bureaucratic problems both internally, and interacting with the EU. Finding a single example which turned out (very) well, like vaccine distribution—which would likely have been possible even if they had been EU members—doesn’t really seem like a convincing pitch, even if it’s true that it was only possible because they left.
FWIW, I personally don’t have much evidence to determine whether Brexit was good. Seems plausible to me that you’re right that they now just have different bureaucratic downsides. I’ve read a few things about being able to make ARIA (UK version of ARPA) and some other things from 2019 that make me lean somewhat positive, but I’m extremely agnostic. I have a bunch of thoughts on quality of evidence here, but suffice it to say I am not sure whether we will ever get much Bayesian evidence on goodness or badness. So my interest in DC is relatively orthogonal to whether Brexit turns out to be object-level good or bad (even though ideally I would know this and be able to include it in my model of how much to believe his beliefs).
I agree that evidence is weak, but I think it will be much clearer in the future whether it was a mistake—and the pathways for it to have been good are different than for it to have been bad.
Two concrete things that would be strong evidence either way which we’d see in the next 5 years:
- Significant divergence from previous economic trajectory that differs from changes in the EU.
- UK choosing to rejoin the EU due to domestic pressure, or general public agreement that it was good.
Perhaps more likely, we see a mix of evidence, and we conclude that like most complex policy decisions, it will take an additional decade or two for a consensus of economists and historians to emerge so we clearly see what the impact was.
That said, I would be very happy to bet at even odds about it resolving as a clear negative—albeit with a very long resolution time frame, needing a somewhat qualitative resolution criteria.
Not sure why you think domestic pressure / public agreement is strong evidence. Public pressure for all sorts of things seems hardly correlated with whether they’re beneficial.
I think the strongest arguments for Brexit are pretty orthogonal to the economy. Things like “can the government react to crises on the order of weeks instead of months”. I do think enough crises would give us data on this but I’m not even sure it will be reasonable to extract counterfactuals from several. Other reasons to do Brexit seem similarly hard to measure compared to myopic economic impact.
I didn’t say “domestic pressure / public agreement is strong evidence,” I said that a reversal of the decision for those reasons would be strong evidence. And yes, I think that a majority of voters agreeing it was so much of a mistake that it is worth it to re-enter on materially worse terms, which it would need to be, would be a clear indication that the original decision was a bad one.
And I’m not sure why you say that a change in the long term trajectory of growth is a myopic criteria. If the principal benefit is better ability to react to crises, given the variety of crises that occur and their frequency, that should be obvious over the course of years, not centuries, and would absolutely affect economic growth over the long term.
Ah yeah, I should have thought more about what you meant there. Sorry. I’m still not sure I agree though—I feel like the public can be convinced of all sorts of things.
I do think growth may end up being decent evidence. I guess I’m trying to point at why I might be so agnostic without going through a 10-paragraph essay explicitly stating a bunch of scenarios.
So for example, I think people are fairly unconcerned about whether they have a 20% versus a 30% GDP growth over the next 15 years, but rightly concerned about whether there’s then a pandemic that kills a bunch of people and curtails quality of life drastically (just outside the bounds of our growth measurement, arguendo). So, especially as the world gets more and more crazy and plausibly near end-game, I’m willing to trade off increasingly more GDP growth for other things like liberties, nimble government, less-partisan politics, literal political experimentation, etc, that increase quality of life and general or political sanity and decrease likelihood of disasters. I could imagine a world where those things also cashed out immediately in enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but I could also imagine a world where there were ways to get some of these that required real economic sacrifices.
Being first to roll out vaccines is not enough, other European countries have managed to keep more people alive, and created safe environments—mitigations such as masks and clean air being the norm. Covid cases yesterday 13th October, 2021.
France: 1,120 Spain: 1,277 Italy: 1,561 Germany: 4,872
UK: 40,224
Which country do you think has sane clean air policies? To me it feels like one of the most annoying features of German policy making regarding COVID that clean air isn’t given much weight.
Moving to the actual point, there are policies where EU rules interfer and there are policies where EU rules don’t have much of an effect. The way drugs get licensed is one where EU rules matter a lot and thus it relates to the Brexit.
On the other hand I’m not seeing how Brexit has an effect on masks or clean air.
I was responding to an assertion that the UK had done well in dealing with COVID because of the speed of vaccination roll out. The head of the UK’s medicines regulator said that the authorisation for the COVID vaccine was actually permitted under EU law. I believe him.
It is the case that the UK has a very high rate of infection and deaths compared to other similar European countries. Calls for proven, effective mitigations (repeated by Independent Sage) eg mask-wearing, providing safe ventilation in schools and workplaces, and having a Test, Track and Trace system fit for purpose, have been ignored in the UK.
I do not know about Germany’s mitigations in any detail. I am aware of a much lower death and infection rate there (and in France, Italy and Spain) compared to the UK.
I saw this in 2020:
Germany improves ventilation to chase away Covid—BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk › news › world-europe-54599593
Well,not quite ignored...but there were a lot of problems. The first lockdown was too late , PPE wasn’t available, the track and trace system was too late and not good enough..and so on. Attempts were made.