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Comment by tcldr | Hacker News Reader

Will be interesting to see how this plays out for London long-term.

Obviously there’s been massive fallout, businesses decimated, and I’d personally have preferred we stayed in the EU – but it seems to me we’re yet to see what the ultimate result for London will be.

The touted ‘Singapore of the West’ idea is what many say Brexit was all about, and if that takes place it could even strengthen London’s position as a global financial hub and playground of the rich and famous.

In any case, the losers of Brexit will be many of the very people who voted for it who will see public services further cut to pay for ultra low corporation tax.

We’ll find out soon enough.

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Actually, we'll never find out who the winners and losers of Brexit were.

Yes, I suppose you’re right! But we’ll certainly see which predictions were closest to the mark.

What do you mean by this? That’ll take a long time to play out?

I believe that things like this are simply unknowable by any rational take because we're dealing with an extraordinary complex system.

To make a statement like "These were the winners or losers of Brexit" you'd have to clone the universe at the point of the Brexit vote, change the outcome of the vote, and let this parallel universe run forward in time. Then you could compare that parallel universe to our universe and see who is better off and who not. This is, of course, not possible as far as we know and probably never will be.

Going in after some number of years and observing that certain parts of the population are better or worse off conflates a ridiculous number of things.

So, in conclusion, statements like "Brexit was bad/good for low/high income households in the UK" are always and exclusively made for political purposes. Which is OK. But let's not pretend this has anything to do with science.

Note to my future self:

On top of the argument above, there is also the issue of "chaos" with complex systems. "Chaos" means that small perturbations to the initial state of a complex system can lead to vastly different outcomes ("the butterfly effect"; also found this here via HN the other day: http://www.complexity-explorables.org/explorables/double-tro...).

So in the case of Brexit: the outcome in the cloned universe after 5 years could be very different if the pro-Brexit vote was changed to either 49.9% or 49.99%. It could also be very similar, of course.

Long term or short term, there's no counterfactual.

In the absence of a parallel universe or crystal ball, how would you know that the entities who seem to be winners after Brexit wouldn't have won twice over without Brexit? And how would you know that firms and economies that fall behind would have been more successful if "Remain" had won the day?

Who is touting a "Singapore of the West" idea?

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/08/12/boris-johnsons-rea...

> In any case, the losers of Brexit will be many of the very people who voted for it who will see public services further cut to pay for ultra low corporation tax.

This is a very traditionally left view of the society. The problem with it isn't that its leftist, but that it is blind towards the opposing side (i.e. most people saying these things would fail ideological Turing test).

Believe it or not, but people may care more than "who's getting rich". EU seems to erode their (Brexit supporters) national identity.

If you ask, "but why do they care about their national identity MORE than them benefiting from things individually", well its for the same reason why from the same group people join the military.

> Believe it or not, but people may care more than "who's getting rich". EU seems to erode their (Brexit supporters) national identity.

I’m still not sure I’d call them winners – but if that’s what they want who am I to tell them otherwise.

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