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.
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.