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.
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.