One could argue that, being in the EU but outside of the Eurozone, Britain has had the best deal of any member state this century.
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What did people think would happen and why did they think it? How place and data damages rational thought.
Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit by Will Davies.
Place.
Public sector back-office jobs were strategically relocated to South Wales and the North East to alleviate deindustrialisation, while tax credits made low productivity service work more socially viable.
This effectively created a shadow welfare state that was never publicly spoken of, and co-existed with a political culture which heaped scorn on dependency.
Knowing that your business, farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction. More bizarrely, it has since emerged that regions with the closest economic ties to the EU in general (and not just of the subsidised variety) were most likely to vote Leave.
Promise.
This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise, that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change.
The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric.
The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of ‘policy-based evidence’.
Sentiment.
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish.
Financial markets are themselves far more like tools of sentiment analysis than producers of ‘facts’. Prediction markets are little more than an aggregative representation of the same feelings and moods that one might otherwise detect via twitter. They’re not in the business of truth-telling, but of mood-tracking.
Reality.
Britain dodged the catastrophic error of the single currency. As a result, it has been relatively free to pursue the fiscal policies that it deems socially and politically desirable. But in contrast to southern European members of the EU, Britain is scarcely constrained at all.
Meanwhile, nations that might genuinely describe themselves as ‘shackled’, have suffered serious threats to their democracy.
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See Surveillance Capitalism for related risks to good decision making.
See Social Chromatography for possible alternative measures.