Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the "axe-grinding" "arguments" that you dismiss?

I have not, and my comment was not intended to slam whatever genuinely unbiased academic studies of the topic there are.

My comment's referring to the times I've been a bystander for arguments about the utility of pharmaceutical drug regulation, both in real life and online; a pattern I noticed is the arguers failing to cite hard, quantitative evidence or make an argument based on the numbers. At best they might cite particular claims from think tanks or other writers/groups with a political agenda that would plausibly bias the analysis.

So when I say I've seen the argument before, I'm not thinking of the abstract debate over whether what the FDA does is a net good or not, or particular pieces of academic work; I'm thinking of concrete occasions where people have started arguing about it in my presence, and the failure of the people I've witnessed arguing about it to present detailed evidence.

I haven't tried to research the topic in detail, so I don't know precisely what ground the academic studies cover. At any rate, I didn't mean to claim knowledge of the field and to imply that there aren't any. I genuinely do just mean that I haven't seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don't mention them when they argue about the issue. As I wrote before, I added the 'axe to grind' warning not as a preemptive slam on academics, but because I suspect there have already been some overtly partisan analyses of the subject, and I want to discourage people from suggesting them to me.

Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don't consider it "rigorous" or "comprehensive."

In this context, what I mean by 'rigorously and comprehensively' is that the analysis should satisfy basic standards for causal inference - all important confounding variables should be accounted for, and so on. For example, it would not be 'rigorous' to just collect a list of countries and compare the lifespan of those with an FDA-like administration with those that don't, because there are almost certainly confounding variables involved, and it's not clear that lifespan is a suitably relevant overcome variable. We might pick a more suitable outcome variable and use a regression to try controlling for one or two confounders, but we still wouldn't have a 'comprehensive' analysis without a list of all of the significant confounding variables, and a way to adjust for them or vitiate their effects.

One rigorous and comprehensive way to evaluate the question, although not a very realistic one, would be a global randomized trial. We might agree on a set of outcome variables, carefully measure them in every country in the world, randomly assign half the countries to having an FDA and the other half no FDA, and then come back after a pre-agreed number of years to re-measure the outcome variables and check for an effect in the countries with an FDA.

Now of course we don't have that dataset, so if we want evidence we have to make do with what we have, perhaps by comparing the US and Europe as you mention. That could be a pretty good way to test for a positive/negative effect of drug regulation, or it could be a pretty bad way, but I'd need to hear more details about the precise method to say.

Maybe I'm overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.

I'm not sure what you believe we're disagreeing about. I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of my intentions - I wasn't trying to score points off RomanDavis or Houshalter or mattnewport or anyone else in this thread, or imply that drug regulation is obviously good/bad and only an axe grinder could think otherwise. At any rate, if you have citations for academic studies you think I'd find informative, I'd like them.

Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.

Yup. I thought of the 'without an axe to grind' proviso because I expect some politically-aligned think tanks out there have already published pamphlets or reports arguing one side or the other, but I wouldn't be inclined to take their claims very seriously.

EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who'd I make mad and why?

Whoever did it, it's not just you.

EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who'd I make mad and why?

Me too. Around 30 points in around 10 minutes. I'm flattered.

The "people to be affected" are the general public, who suffer when contagious diseases aren't treated properly, and the general public makes these decisions through elected politicians. Also, these decisions are frequently based on recommendations by administrators with degrees in Public Health.