The entire drug research sphere outside of the US is miniscule. Unless you can sell the drug in the US there's very little point to investing in the large scale research needed to truly determine efficacy. Yeah there's some minimal state sponsored stuff outside of the US. BUt it's like comparing Little League to the MLB.

Where do you get this idea from? More than half of all major drug companies are based in Europe and Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_com...

Maybe from the fact that half of all pharmaceutical revenues come from the US (and likely a much higher share of the profits). Single-payer systems are more cost-effective but definitely provide less revenue to pharmaceutical companies.

“We can overcharge patients” in no way leads to the logical conclusion that “more medicine is developed here.”

It just means your pharma companies can get away with higher profit margins.

Ok, I think your list, and the fact that HALF are in 1 Country VS the entire rest of the world qualifies my statement. As well Roche, ASZ, and GSK do the bulk of their research in the US.

On top of that the largest outside of the US is China and there is very little trust of data coming from there in the Western World.

If this great science fiction scenario were to come to pass, I’m pretty confident that it wouldn’t be only the FDA that would be pushed to the side.

The impact of a population in an organised, technologically advanced society being one standard deviation of intelligence higher than a strategic rival population … would be immense.

Even if just temporarily boosting intelligence, something like a militarised Flowers for Algernon scenario is pretty terrifying.

Someone I know pointed out that there’s a feedback effect: groups where everyone is smarter do better not just because of the first order effect but also because they can cooperate better. There’s a roughly quadratic effect on productivity.

Mass enhancement of the general population would have far reaching consequences.

Why? It will only result in more and harder dictatorship, more direct terror and fear, and even more unhappy society. Democracy works best when people are easy to manipulate through mass media. Smart people will need to be coerced by force. Maybe in fact, to a degree this is what already happening. Superior education in China makes democratic transition next to impossible.

Maybe the observation that countries with the best education tend to be authoritarian is not because "dictators are good at educating people" but other way around - because it's a natural selection and if a highly educated country tries to transition to democracy, it either ruins democracy, or education, or country itself.

Any model of governance mainly solves the problem of "how to satisfy interests of the stakeholders - i.e. the elite - without ruining things"; there are many ways to ruin things (even elite itself can bring about it's own downfall), but the one everyone fears most is when people get too angry. Democracy is a good way to shift responsibility back to people itself, thus defusing this threat. But it requires people being sufficiently dumb to bite it.

>countries with the best education tend to be authoritarian

On what basis are you making this claim?

> Democracy works best when people are easy to manipulate through mass media

This is a huge statement that seems wrong to me. Democracy works best when the population are engaged and hard to manipulate.

Also the "observation that countries with the best education are authoritarian" seems wrong to me too. The data I see has the top 10 entirely filled with democracies, with Singapore as the first nondemocracy coming in at 11th place. Check the economist democracy index, the correlation between democracy and education is imperfect but strong.

And those are arguments based on data. There are also arguments based on logic. Authoritarianism and education are fundamentally opposed, because authoritarians hate the teaching of things that disagree with their own specific viewpoint and suppress it.

> Democracy works best when people are easy to manipulate through mass media. Smart people will need to be coerced by force.

Been there done that, it’s called Russia.

I don’t agree with your worldview, but if I was presented with the choice is between dumb, fake democracy and clever competent dictatorship, I might as well choose the latter. At least trains will run on time.

The clever, competent dictatorship is quite rare, though.

And short-lived

The Chinese government ran a huge research effort to try and determine the genes for intelligence. From what I understand it was a failure, as the genetic causes of intelligence are too spread out and varied to be easily isolated.

I'm pretty sure if the project had succeeded that the Chinese government would have had no moral qualms about gene-engineering a population with an IQ of 130+ and the US would be permanently behind in every field forever after.

> the Chinese government would have had no moral qualms about gene-engineering a population with an IQ of 130+ and the US would be permanently behind in every field forever after.

The US is already a key brain-drain destination for Chinese elites, why would that change?

I think all sorts of assumptions are baked into that statement. Would the CCP even survive if the population IQ was 130+?

It would be a worthy ultimate sacrifice

> Chinese government would have had no moral qualms about gene engineering

Anyone cares to shed a tear for IQ 85/90 people that have to navigate increasingly complex world?

Look at the amount of legal documents, EULA’s, software, and complex corporate structures that an average Joe has to deal with today vs 50 years ago. How long u till average person can no longer cope?

There's an assumption here that such drugs will exist. They might not.