Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com