Does this attitude almost guarantee we don't reach a global optimum? I mean I get the rationale to protect your own citizens or your own tribe of any sort like family. But in the degenerate case when no one cooperates on anything seems like you have a strong likelihood of everyone losing. If you don't help me then I won't help you, and neither of us gets what we need.

Some countries behave even more strangely. India barred entry of its own citizens into India. One KLM flight was turned back from Delhi because it had Indian citizens on board.

The flight was allowed to land 2 days later. The earlier decision was taken in mistake.

Have morals that aren't a function of geographic location, presumably.

If you only have limited supplies its immoral to help somebody geographically closer than you than somebody further away?

Ceteris paribus I don't think many people would find that immoral, no.

Isn’t it clearly immoral to sacrifice the interests of the people who elected you to support another nation?

The morality argument here considers countries (defined as government + population) as actors, rather than governments. So the question is rather whether it's immoral for the people who elect a government to demand that it represents solely their interests to the point of sacrificing other people.

That’s not what is happening if it is a tragedy of the commons.

Maybe, in the sense that it could be politically destabilizing or something like that.

Some things are a zero sum game, some aren't. Vaccine IP is absolutely in the latter class. You want everyone in every country to be vaccinated, and you absolutely don't want to be poisoning and derailing this universal goal by talk of putting up national barriers around vaccine IP.

That's true, but at the same time, it shows the need for a global government to coordinate responses to global problems like this pandemic.

A global government would have led to a more uniform response, but arguably that's exactly what we don't want in a crisis like this.

Each nation was able to react differently, and those different responses have provided us the closest thing we have to controlled experiments. Those experiments have allowed us to understand the spread of this disease better.

The global response is pretty uniform (almost every country following the same strategy). But it was too slow, and too uncoordinated in the sense that different countries enacted their protective measures at different times, with little to no warning to others, resulting in unnecessarily severe disruptions of the supply chain.

We're all following the same strategy now because of the countries that didn't follow that strategy taught the rest of us what not to do.

Imagine if a world government had responded the way China did. That is, lie about the problem until it gets too big then forcibly lock people into their homes. What reason do we have to think that a world government would do anything different?

> then forcibly lock people into their homes

Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei. The western equivalent of that would be if the UN ordered isolation of Italy, and then ordered the rest of the EU, the UK and the US to ship food, personnel and PPEs to Italy, all in the space of days.

But UN doesn't have that power, EU doesn't have that power either, so here we are.

>> then forcibly lock people into their homes

> Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

When I say "forcibly locking people in" I mean welding the doors shut[0]. Last I checked that's not something the rest of us are doing.

> Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei.

Which if they hadn't pretended in the first place, would not have been necessary. So why did they pretend, and why did they stop?

My guess is that the deceit was somehow connected to protecting the Chinese government's legitimacy, and that only once news of the outbreak spread and deceit was untenable did they own up to it.

A world government has every incentive to suppress any information that may challenge it's legitimacy, and no external entities capable of publicizing the truth.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/01/coronav...

A global government could very well have planned this diversity. Just like hospitals organize different test groups.

Could have does not imply would have.

Neither the difficulty of planning at that scale, nor the failure modes of a centralized government entity, should be underestimated.

Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO. Thanks but no thanks. At least with nation states you have some checks and balances. It's also way too much concentrated power for my liking.

> Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO.

Or like the federal government of the United States. I think we've been having pretty bad luck this year with large and influential organizations, which is a fair counterpoint to a global government proposal.