Lessons of Brexit

Intelligent policy-making requires more than thinking; it requires material and institutional conditions which the UK has lacked for years.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the vote to leave the EU - one of the worst political decisions in living memory.

It’s not just those experts of whom people have had enough who believe this. So too do the voters. According to Yougov, 57% think we were wrong to vote to leave the EU, including 23% of Leave voters. And only 12% think Brexit has been a success.

Our biggest political decision in years, taken after months of extensive public debate, was therefore mistaken.

Unlike other bad decisions, such as the Truss/Kwarteng Budget or the election of a succession of inadequate prime ministers, this decision doesn’t look like being swiftly corrected. When it mattered most, therefore, our political system and culture got it wrong.

Which raises the question: what can be learned from this?

The answer is NOT merely that “bad men lied”. Yes they did, for example the claims that Turkey would soon join the EU or that leaving would give the NHS an extra £350m per week. But this only poses two questions: why did people believe the lies? and why were the lies not successfully exposed as such?

Let’s take the first question. People didn’t believe the lies merely because they were stupid. Natural experiments conducted by Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes show us that intelligent people can fall victim to scams. Instead, there are a few psychological mechanisms which Leavers - maybe knowingly, maybe not - tapped into, such as:

- Wishful thinking. People want to believe there are easy answers and the wish is father to the belief. The idea that the “easiest [trade deal] in human history” would solve our problems was such an answer.

- Deference. We have, said Adam Smith, a “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful.” It’s no accident that the pushers of lies such as Farage and Johnson were posh public schoolboys of the sort which some people look up to.

- Prospect theory (pdf). People who have lost money are sometimes willing to gamble to get even. That’s why, for example, why they tend to back outsiders (pdf), especially in the last race of the day. Brexit therefore appealed to those who felt that they’d lost out - to those who agreed with Anand Menon’s heckler: “That’s your bloody GDP, not ours.”

- Snake oil. People are likely to turn to con-men if the alternatives have failed. Werner Troesken shows how snake-oil sellers (pdf) exploited this. They invested a lot in advertising and in product differentiation and so when other products failed they could claim that theirs would work when the others hadn’t. Similarly, Brexit was offered as an alternative to previous policies.

These last two mechanisms are consistent with the facts that support for Brexit was strongest in areas hardest hit by austerity and in areas that suffered more deaths from suicide and drug use, symptoms of socio-economic dysfunction. This fits a general tendency for economic stagnation (as evidenced for example by pub or shop closures) to foster support for the far-right*.

Brexit wasn’t therefore merely the result of lies. Discontent with the existing order created a rich soil in which lies could take hold.

Which raises our second question. To extend the gardening metaphor, why were these lies not rooted out? John Stuart Mill famously thought that in a free discussion “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” This did not happen in the Brexit debate. Why not? To put this another way, why did the media not call out and correct lies?

Simple. Journalists don’t tell the truth for the same reason that they don’t deliver our groceries or fill potholes. It’s not their job. The job of journalists is the same as that of every other employee - to do as their employer wants. And much of the media is run by those who support Brexit more than they support truth and honesty. The BBC was too weak a counterweight to this propaganda, preferring to report the controversy rather than the facts.

Our public sphere - the realm in which political debate occurs - has fallen victim to a tragedy of the commons. Just as individual pursuit of self-interest can cause common land to become over-grazed or fishing stocks to become depleted, so the self-interested pursuit of partisan opinion degrades the public sphere.

To push the analogy further, commons were traditionally often protected by stinting: setting limits, often through social norms, on how much one could graze or fish. Analogously, the public sphere was once protected by norms against lying. But the demise of those norms flooded the zone with shit.

How to change this is a separate question; suffice to say here that it should be much higher on the political agenda than it is.

Instead, my point is addressed to those who believe, I think rightly, that Brexit was a mistake.

It’s not sufficient merely to point out this fact. We also need to be aware that Brexit arose from particular socio-economic and institutional conditions - in particular a stagnant economy which fostered not merely discontent with the existing order but also hostility to liberalism and an open society; and a privatized public sphere which allowed lies and fanaticism to thrive.

And these two factors are still very relevant.

Which brings me to my beef with centrists and technocrats of all parties. Calling for good policies is like writing recipes when you don’t even have a kitchen - a pointless display of intellectual superiority. Instead, the challenge is: how can we create the conditions in which intelligent policy-making is even feasible? Those who want liberal technocratic policies must favour radical change, because only this will create the conditions in which rational policy-making is even possible.

* All this is not wisdom after the fact: Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth was published in 2006 and should therefore have been known long before the Tories implemented fiscal austerity.