I'm arguing in favor of representative government where elected people decide on what makes the most sense for complex issues. Relying on advice from experts, but ultimately making the call that's in the country's best interest.
For reference here's some prediction from back then:
>The Treasury's "cautious" economic forecasts of the two years following a vote to leave - which assumes a bilateral trade agreement with the EU would have been negotiated - predicts Gross Domestic Product would grow by 3.6% less than currently predicted.
>In such a scenario, it suggests sterling would fall by 12%, unemployment would rise by 520,000, average wages would fall by 2.8% and house prices would be hit by 10%.
Which was pessimistic. Sterling certainly fell, about 20%, but unemployment's doing fine so far.
It bothers me immensely how quickly the truth gets discarded the moment it conflicts with EU ideology. The UK has shown excellent economics relative to the rest of Europe since the vote despite its people being told "uncertainty" would trigger a massive recession and employment bloodbath. Yet here you are, saying it's turning into the sick man of Europe!
Important big money already migrated to Ireland (mostly), but it takes some time (years, multiple) to take an effect if any.
Treasury (as well as other organisations) predicted that the vote itself would immediately trigger a deep and severe recession.
One has to admit that there is something of a conflict of interest when it comes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer producing a document to analyse the negative consequences of a scenario which his own prime minister was campaigning against.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/18/imf-says-br...
The entire global establishment of "experts" united together and made a series of predictions that weren't just wrong by a percentage, they were wrong in the wrong direction. There are NO organisations that I remember who predicted the outcome correctly. There were though, quite a lot of vox pops with the man on the street who said words to the effect of, "it'll be fine, we'll manage".
The brutal reality is that people who put their faith in the notion of expert understanding of politics or economics have been made to look very foolish, and worse, many of them don't seem to have accepted the uselessness or bias levels of the people the media present as experts. They are still being upheld not only as important, but actually as people who should be given vast new powers to run government! It's quite concerning.
The article starts "Leaving the EU would hit British living standards" and only talks about recession (occurring in 2017) in the context of the "adverse scenario" they modelled.
As explained here:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/imf-christi...
"[The adverse scenario] was predicated on the UK’s EU negotiations collapsing and the UK eventually crashing out of the bloc without a trade deal."
which hasn't happened (yet).
So I think the lessons to be learnt are that journalists can be guilty of over-simplifying economic analyses (presenting conditional scenarios as certain outcomes) and that government analyses can be self-serving (if they are published before a vote in which the government is campaigning for one side).
Of course for people who still believe, economics is unfalsifiable because these predictions are often of the form "x.y% less than it would have been" but there's no way to tell what any given stat "would have been" unless you accept the premise that these people can predict the economy ... which they clearly can't.
I would like to move there.