Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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Amazon doesn't care about guys like Lectronz, they're far too small, and the EU Commission really doesn't care about Amazon. They're openly antagonistic to US tech firms.

Occam's Razor applies here. These regulations exist because the EU is 10,000+ civil servants writing whatever laws they want with no meaningful democratic accountability (this sort of thing is nobody's priority). They love creating new laws, they love micromanagement, they always have and they always will. There is nothing here we haven't already seen with things like the bottle top regulations, laws about how fast kettles can boil water and more.

And there is no end to this. The EU Commission is on a path that will completely kill the European economy, dragging it to Soviet levels or worse. By design there's no constitutional mechanism to force them to change course, save for every country following Britain and just leaving. That's why there's such a massive pile of propaganda trying to convince Europeans that Brexit was an unrepeatable disaster (which it wasn't, check the data for yourself).

I don't have a horse in this race, but sources I found claim Brexit was economically detrimental to this day, including but not limited to the wiki page and its citations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit

It's a bad idea to trust Wikipedia for anything that might have a political or ideological slant that would upset the left, which the non-impact of Brexit definitely did. For instance, there are biographical pages on Wikipedia for people who died years ago but Wiki claims they're still alive, because the only websites that reported the death are anti-woke and thus considered not "reliable sources". So they just ... revert any edits stating the person died.

To understand the true state of things you need to look elsewhere these days. Sad, but that's what seems to happen when you rely on volunteer moderators.

That page specifically is citing a lot of "studies" that are just wishcasting by academics, e.g.

> A 2018 analysis by Stanford University and Nottingham University economists estimated that uncertainty around Brexit reduced investment by businesses by approximately 6 percentage points and caused an employment reduction by 1.5 percentage points.

Unemployment continuously fell after the vote in 2016 until it reached record lows. But if you believe Wikipedia you'd think unemployment rose. This is the kind of thing they define as reliable sources.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rat...

I don't understand. The 10year view on the site you linked shows a spike in unemployment in 2020 after Brexit took effect, and current rates are still higher than pre-Brexit rates. Is there an explanation for why the 2016 vote would be directly responsible for the temporary dip?

But I'm not convinced you can prove or disprove anything from one graph without context and analysis.

Nobody claimed the 2016 vote lowered unemployment. It was on a steady downward trend that continued for years, uninterrupted by the vote. This wasn't what economists predicted: they claimed the "uncertainty" of a Leave vote would cause a huge recession with 800,000 job losses. That's what the wiki quote is about - note that 2018, when the Stanford guys made their claims, is before 2020.

Give it time

How much time? Doesn't seem like the trend is reversing

About 30 years

When economists struggle disentangling the effects of brexit from the pandemic, an actual disaster, and so can't really determine if brexit was a disaster, I feel like you can't honestly say it wasn't. But still, while it's hard to gauge how bad the effect was, few experts seems to think it was good.

The most honest reading of the data is that it was neither bad nor good; that it had no impact on anything whatsoever. Whether you read this as a win for the Leave or Remain factions is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't think that's an honest reading. If there were a wealth of data and analyses that suggested the UK's economy is larger because of brexit I could agree but I certainly can't find any. You're right to be skeptical of the doomsayers that predicted (and continue to predict) disaster, but it seems incredibly unlikely (and unsupported by data) that Brexit did nothing.

Why would you need to see evidence that the economy is larger because of Brexit when what I said was it made no difference, larger or smaller?

It only seems incredibly unlikely it did nothing because we were all subjected to industrial-scale propaganda claiming the effect would be huge. In hindsight it is obvious why there was no effect: the single market is only a single market for goods, but Britain primarily exports services.

The broad swathe of analyses done to answer the question of "how did the economy change due to brexit?" consistently suggest brexit shrunk the economy. All analyses are biased or flawed in some way because they rely on making a prediction of what the economy would have been if brexit hadn't happened, but that's only a prediction. Since they are flawed, but they are many, the likely truth is in the aggragate of many analyses, just like when we take multiple measurements of a noisy system and take the mean to get a more certain result than any one analysis. If what you're saying is true I would expect there to be some predictions that back up what you're saying exactly, along with a number of predictions that the economy increased in size. That's why I'm asking for evidence of predictions of a larger economy, because it makes your statement far more plausible.

Your point on goods isn't... Good. Services is the majority but goods still make up ~1/3rd of exports, and don't forget we still have to import goods. Brexit affected that too.

truth of this unfortunately depends on the analysis of others, thus when those analyses . The data cannot itself show whether the

> that Brexit was an unrepeatable disaster (which it wasn't, check the data for yourself).

OK thanks I'll go find and check the data to back up your claim

I'm not agreeing with everything that this user wrote but for sure the Brexit did not destroy UK's economy. GDP-wise the UK and France always developed very similarly before Brexit and also after Brexit, so it's hard to call it a "desaster".

I still remember the articles saying that Britons will have no food on shelves after Brexit.

And no flights to Europe !! Since then, both Ryanair and Easyjet have OPENED new flights.between the UK and mainland Europe...

>dragging it to Soviet levels or worse

The Soviet Union at least had factories and an arms industry, even if they were quite inefficient.

A depressingly true point.

> They're openly antagonistic to US tech firms.

Utterly wrong. US tech firms have on many occasions violated deep fundamental EU regulations/rights and have barely received a slap on the wrist (fines). Very little is done to keep them in check, and to this day the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the member States are all very dedicated customers of big american tech firms (eg. Microsoft).

> they love micromanagement

Quite the opposite actually. EU regulations and directives give great margin for state-specific implementation, as shown in this particular case with each country having different packaging authority/fees. If anything, the EU is mostly about destroying existing pro-consumer pro-worker pro-environment pro-privacy regulations that were in place in member states. See also: deregulation of medical devices, deregulation of food and toxic chemicals, deregulation of public services. That's precisely because of deregulation that the EU is widely criticized from within (side-note for the nitpickers, they're not technically deregulating, but rather regulating with looser rules and bodies with no actual enforcement capacities which is overall equivalent).

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