I think at the core of this discussion, and false consciousness in general, is the question of how can we know what knowledge is true. I certainly agree with you, probably more than it appears in this thread, that we shouldn't take economics as some objective science. That's why I said up-thread that this is all discursive. But I think we are in real danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and dismissing any economic knowledge at all. Larry Elliot has a good article here about economists' failings [1]. What I take from that is that, yes, forecasts are very shaky but economics itself analyses the failings and uses it to build better understanding (whether HMT uses that knowledge is a different question). SWL talks here [2] about the benefits of trade and compares dismissals of economic knowledge to climate denial. I think that's too strong but I am reluctant to dismiss the idea that we can gain empirical economic knowledge. (Incidentally if you know any good, pro-Brexit economics blogs please do let me know).
It seems that you implicitly rely on economics in some of your scenarios, thinking etc but then when you come against an economic idea or prediction you disagree with you just dismiss it with "oh well, economists are always wrong". I mean, if they are then how do you know the economics implied in your scenarios are correct? Why bother trying to get trade deals? Why bother making any economic arguments for Brexit if it's all unknowable? How do you know which of the US-style economic policies are the ones that created the growth? Surely there is some validity in testing hypotheses?
Continuing this skepticism, maybe you don't intend this but your comments read as if you think working-class people have some kind of natural, clear-headed insight from their lived experience that the elite and their academics don't have. I'm not sure from where you draw your certainty that you know what the entire working class is thinking, nor why a judgement based on individual lived experience should be any more reliable than one based on broader evidence. I don't think "economists missed the 2008 crash and got post-Brexit wrong so I can ignore them all now and go off what I see around me" is really a strong argument.
If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can? Maybe, like some economist, you've got a model that worked a few times but is going to come crashing down any day now. Shouldn't the same skepticism apply to you? Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states. See [3] for more recent data -- hardly comparing very well either. France is comparable and I wouldn't say the US is in a different ballpark. It doesn't seem like you update your priors in response to new data so what makes you think you are any more likely to be right? Or, to return to falsifiability, what would make you think you're wrong?
Coming back to false consciousness, I don't think it's the views themselves that are problematic but the way in which they are reached. I am doubtful that many people complaining about immigrants overcrowding their hospitals have looked at any evidence to decide whether the complaint is valid. I don't think "lived experience" is enough to make an objective, accurate assessment. You are right of course that we should critique arguments and not just take them at face value. For what it's worth, I'm a lukewarm remainer and I agree entirely with you about the Remain campaign's terrible campaigning. They also failed to mention the impact on N Ireland, which is far more significant and it's a terrible indictment of the British public that neither side bothered to think about the border. That didn't last long anyway...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2017/jan... [2] https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-is-denial-of... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10075412/2-1...
I think there is economic knowledge we can know to be true. A lot of the basics is surely sound, but also quite obvious and simple (supply and demand, printing money creates inflation etc).
The problem and question is to what extent things go off the rails after that? It's worth calibrating our expectations against other fields of science, for example:
1. Ioannadis argued in a very well known paper that about half of all published research findings are false.
2. I've heard repeatedly that Big Pharma/VC supports this, and biotech doesn't get more investment (vs say software firms) partly because about half of all academic microbiology doesn't replicate.
3. Psychology as a field has witnessed large areas collapse completely during the replication crisis: entire careers and phenomenons with hundreds of papers investigating them just turn out to be based on nonsense.
A good example of the latter is this one:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...
It's entirely reasonable to assume that most academic output is false, and that average is significantly biased upwards by hard sciences that are empirically testable. If you focus on subjects that produce explanations of observed data independent of large scale experiments (psychology, economics, history, sociology, yes also climatology etc) then it's fair to assume the vast majority of published output is wrong.
This may seem radical or absurd, but I think this view will become more widespread in future. For instance even in psychology, where experiments are possible (unlike economics), many studies are statistically underpowered to a level that can't plausibly be fixed:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/
It's certainly going to be the case that economics is more wrong than psychology; at least in psychology you can run experiments, even if they're too small.
Thus, given the structural and financial setup of these fields, we can assume they will continue to produce spurious findings indefinitely.
Now, you pose the following question:
If all these expert economists with their models and their papers can't make a prediction why should you or I believe that you can?
You and I have a major structural advantage over professional economists when it comes to making accurate predictions: our careers are not judged by our output.
This gives us a huge edge because we can be as imprecise, simple or intuitive as we like and nobody will care. My Brexit economy prediction wasn't very precise, it was literally "We're being told there will be a huge recession caused by uncertainty and I think that's completely wrong". No recession, thus, my predictions were better than the economists! But mine also didn't have any numbers in it. This is the right level of precision for such a prediction given the state of economic knowledge, and for a non-professional that's fine. For a Treasury official, not so much.
The underlying cause is social: academics and related professions (like government economists) are required by their peers to "publish or perish", preferably in reputable journals. Like speakers on the dinner circuit, they must speak even if they have nothing insightful to say right now. If they come up with something novel or clever sounding they will be promoted and become one of the judges themselves, where they apply the same criteria.
I've been referring to the working classes because Brexit is so often positioned as the 'educated' vs the 'working class', and the article is about class distinctions. But that's actually kind of a gloss over what I really mean. My point is really about specific professions or classes vs everyone else.
Your whole scenario was based on the idea that the EU coveted the UK's growth rate but when I linked to World Bank data showing that in 2018 the UK underperformed literally every member state but Italy (ok, level with Germany) you still say that we're doing very well compared to other member states.
For UK vs France/Italy, remember the UK has a much lower unemployment rate:
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-...
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-...
You're right that my original point about "growth" was over-stated. I was thinking of some quarters where the UK had better GDP growth than Germany along with better employment stats than France, wage growth etc. There's been lots of positive economic news lately.
But it doesn't actually matter - the overall point I was making remains even if the UK would have weaker growth at the moment. Namely, there are plausible scenarios in which leaving is good for growth and you don't have to be ignorant to believe them. We can see how the EU seems to be scared of the idea of the UK deregulating and becoming more competitive. For instance Angela Merkel stated outright that in future Germany may have to face the UK as a competitor alongside China and the USA (implication: today they don't). The French Secretary of State for European Affairs has said outright about the UK, "I don't want a tax haven on our doorstep". It seems like they take the scenario of a stronger British economy outside the EU seriously, and I guess that's enough to validate the scenario.
Re: economics blogs. Unfortunately I don't read any economics blogs. The Telegraph has columnists who lay out some of the ideas and Leave campaigners (including Boris, to his credit) have in the past proposed various things the UK could do to increase competitiveness, like the free ports.
Finally, falsifiability. Yes, I do think about this. One thing that makes it hard is my own predictions are a mix of short range which were proven true already, and long range, but those are only about a specific scenario that probably won't happen (Conservatives get more conservative and significantly liberalise the economy). But the advantage of not being an economist is I can happily say "I don't know what will happen next year" and nobody will care, which is why I can be more accurate than them :)
In my view, what matters is not so much the belief itself but the way in which it's reached. Let's return to the hospital example and assume that your local hospital is overcrowded and underfunded. If you look at immigration levels in your area, read about the economic impact of migration and the levels of government funding to your area and decide that, on balance, hospital overcrowding is due to immigration then I would not consider that false consciousness. Possibly incorrect, but not false consciousness. If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense" and haven't even considered the possibility that the migrants are contributing more than they take or that the government funding has been inadequate.
The whole questions of knowledge that we've been debating, though very important, is in a sense secondary to this because the person relying on common sense isn't actively dismissing the claims of economic truth, they're completely unaware of them.
And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants. Assuming that Cameron and Osborne shared the kind of elite worldview we've been discussing, they would have known that the deflection couldn't be justified. They were deliberately spreading a view of the world that, in their minds at least, they would have known to be wrong. So that's why I think it's false consciousness - knowingly spreading a false belief.
Where it gets complicated is when the elite come to believe the idea as well, and then it's just a received wisdom (and the original intent has completed succeeded). I think you're right to call out remainers' unquestioning belief that the EU is a good thing, though I disagree on how much we can rely on economic. You're right that we should be skeptical of that too, of course.
One important thing that neither of us has mentioned that much is the role of the media in propagating beliefs and the extent to which the British public's view of the EU has been shaped by the likes of Boris Johnson printing knowingly false stories about the EU ("knowingly spreading a false belief"...). I'd argue that all of these [1] are examples of false consciousness. Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues. And if the media aren't trying to present a factual account of reality, that raises the question of what are they trying to do instead...?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-publ...
Edit to add: I used to read the Telegraph but then they went down a weird spiral of clickbait mixed with making everything interesting premium-only. A pity because it used to be very good.
Hmm. Isn't that just a lie? What makes it false consciousness and not just a more ordinary concept like manipulation?
If you just see a lot of Romanians on the street and read lots of anti-immigration stories in your newspaper and conclude that the overcrowding is due to immigration then I'd consider that false consciousness because you are relying on a notion of "basic common sense"
Is the key issue here newspapers vs government sources or is it the inclusion of personal eyewitness observations? I'm not sure newspapers are really worse at spreading false beliefs than government sources are, but that would seem to be the only distinction based on who's speaking here. Indeed there'd seem to be less risk of false consciousness in this scenario because claims by third parties are being augmented with 'reality checks' against personal observations, whereas in the first scenario you seem to be relying almost entirely on government sources.
And in this particular example I think it's pretty clear that the government sought to deflect anger at austerity to immigrants.
Did they? The UK has had strongly pro-immigrant governments for decades. It only started getting serious about reducing immigration numbers recently and even then only in rhetorical terms: non-EU immigration has now hit record highs, and they could already control that. People want reduced immigration but they don't get it. As for austerity, the Tories blame Labour overspending/structural deficits and Labour blamed conservatism and the financial crisis. Only UKIP made an explicit link to immigrants, and UKIP collapsed after Farage left because they took a stronger anti-immigrant turn that got painted as racism.
So I'm not sure that telling matches my own recollections. I remarked on the Tory poster about immigrants and the NHS partly because it's remarkable: this is the first time I recall seeing Conservative campaigning that directly blames overloading of public services on immigration. It's a ... bold ... move? Given that it's pretty clear they've been supporting high levels of immigration for a long time and Boris is also a big supporter of it.
Either the official figures are all totally wrong and a person looking down their street can make a more accurate estimate than teams of statisticians measuring the entire country, or views are shaped by distorted reporting of these issues.
Are you sure the press is less reliable, or deliberately distorting things? If it contradicts elite sources like academic studies, or government statistical reports, many people assume the elite sources are true and the newspapers are false. Especially papers that the working classes tend to rely on like the Daily Mail.
OK, I think we agree that economists should be treated with some skepticism. What about statistical agencies?
The reason I keep hammering on the unreliability of supposedly neutral and informed elites is because there's so much evidence that they're hopelessly compromised, to the point that average man on the street can beat their reliability. Certainly they shouldn't be shamed for taking their own experience into account.
Here's another piece of evidence I encountered today in support of that view. Above, you're suggesting it's unlikely official statistics about immigration are wrong. I used to believe this too. Fine, academic analysis may be wonky, but surely basic numbers are free of political bias and being measured correctly?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/01/eu-membershi...
[Priti Patel] We don’t really know how many people are in the county either. Earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics downgraded its immigration statistics to “experimental.” In other words, they don’t know how many people are coming into the country or who they are.
So now the Home Secretary is admitting publicly the UK's immigration data is so wrong that "we don't really know". She's the most important consumer of the stats! If she doesn't believe them why should anyone else?
Seeing a Cabinet member admit this so unambiguously was surprising. The conclusion itself less so. I've been suspicious about UK population data for some years now, ever since learning they had stopped correlating with other stats like electricity and water usage in the way they always did historically. You don't read much about that because in fact, most newspapers are also pro-immigration.
My estimation of Patel has gone up for her unobfuscated and honest language. But that just makes the unvarnished truth even more horrible: the left/globalist consensus of "more immigration is always good" has saturated government and academia to such an extent that basically nothing from it on the topic can be trusted. The sort of people who completely ignored what economists, statisticians etc were telling them and just went by "is my hospital waiting room full of immigrants" had an equally accurate or quite possibly more accurate understanding of the impact on public services.
And yet they were so slated for it! So much scorn poured down on their heads, they were called ignorant and racist, and yet now we know the economic analysis was wrong, the stats were wrong, all the sources supposedly superior individuals were relying on for decision making were just completely wrong. We don't even know by how much!
It makes me so sad. I'm not even against immigration. I am myself an immigrant! But watching how deeply this issue has compromised every institution it touches makes me sad for the state of epistomology.
Because it's not just economists and statisticians. Every institution that claims to be neutral, informed and unbiased is shredding its credibility. Ofcom is supposed to enforce political neutrality on broadcasters but the people who work at major TV channels are constantly tweeting their political allegiances, with no consequences. The Speaker of Parliament claimed to be neutral whilst driving around with "Bollocks to Brexit" on his car, then admitted he wasn't the moment he retired. The Electoral Commission claims to be neutral and most of its board have expressed anti-Brexit views in public. The Civil Service ... well, you get the idea.
Not only are these people not neutral, they don't even pretend. Yet constantly they feign offence at any suggestion they might be anything but 100% trustworthy and neutral. It's obvious to the man on the street that nobody claiming to be politically neutral in public life actually is, that they're mostly in the bag for the EU and willing to systematically lie/distort to get their preferred outcomes. So why shouldn't the working classes ignore them and make up their own minds?
I don't know where all this goes, but you're completely right that over time I find my respect for ordinary common sense and 'street logic' going up. Not because it's getting better or more accurate: it's not. It's more that the alternatives presented as better keep getting revealed as being just 'common sense' and 'street logic' of different social classes.
Yes, this is an entirely reasonable perspective, but I'd note that it's also a projection of hypothetical future events (large trade barriers) based on a projection of what Brussels thinks (no trade deal with the treacherous Brits regardless of the mutual costs).
My projection is not less valid than yours, even though it may appear that yours is more projected or more common than the other. My own research led me to conclude that the facade of 'expert consensus' is mostly a creation of journalists and (at the time of the referendum) the Civil Service operating under direction from Cameron and Osborne. There's really much less agreement in the field of economics on the topic of Brexit than is first apparent.
Now, you say this:
My belief is correct if we have a correct understanding of how trade affects growth. Do you think that both beliefs are equally robust?
Actually, yes, I think my beliefs are slightly more robust. Mainly for two reasons:
1. I don't think we have a correct understanding of what economists call growth theory.
2. I think EU realpolitik is significantly easier to analyse than something as large and complex as an economy. It's far fewer people for one, but also, I have made my own predictions about how things would play out both economically and politically with the EU, and so far I've been more right than most of the so-called experts (but not completely right).
The second is hard for me to prove without giving up my identity: I did write publicly about my predictions at the time of the referendum but prefer to post on HN anonymously these days. But anyway, the first will more interesting both for us and anyone reading this thread.
How well do we understand economic growth? The evidence suggests: very badly. It can be easily argued that our understanding hasn't really advanced since the 18th century.
Let's start with one piece of evidence: economic projections are basically always wrong. The only time they're right is when economists are just extrapolating the current trend line and predicting a continuation of whatever's happening now. But they more or less never successfully predict changes from the current trend.
To read about this Google "economic forecast accuracy". There have been many studies. But most working class people don't need studies to know economists don't understand the economy, they just need two events:
a. "Nobody" forecast the 2008 financial crisis.
b. "Everyone" forecast recession in case Leave won.
For example, the Treasury department published an economic forecast that said if Leave won the vote, the 2 year period of Article 50 negotiation would create such massive uncertainty that the economy would enter a year long recession in which it would lose 500,000 jobs in the best case, and 800,000 jobs in the worst case.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-to-enter-recessio...
Clearly this prediction can be tested against reality: the British economy grew strongly (for Europe). These forecasts weren't just wrong, they were wrong in the wrong direction and of course anyone outside of the London elite's knew that was going to happen: they were being told by idiot Londoners in Whitehall that leaving the EU should be the scariest thing that ever happened to them, and it just isn't.
The total corruption of the field of economics can be supported in many other ways. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and staunch left wing anti-Brexit writer for the staunchly pro-EU New York Times, wrote this:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/the-macroeconom...
"I believe that Brexit is a tragic development, which will do substantial long-run economic harm. But what we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious. Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics – but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility."
One of the most frustrating things about Remain supporters for me - and very relevant to the class war this HN thread is originally about - is the complete refusal of so-called elites to update their priors in response to failed predictions by so-called experts.
It doesn't matter that economists get it completely wrong again and again. It doesn't matter that famous economists themselves are saying the field is riven with "motivated reasoning" i.e. politically biased BS posing as expertise. Working class people who draw their own conclusions based on their own lived experience and get it right are ignorant and bad; people with a bachelors degree who put their faith in professors and get it wrong are superior and should be in charge.
How long will it take until EU supporters recognise that many of their predictions have been tested and failed? My guess is never. I've never seen a single one say, gee, I believed the predictions of recession if Leave won and it didn't happen. Maybe I shouldn't have listened. It's a psychological and political decision for everyone in the end, not really about facts or economics.
Now, how badly will trade barriers affect the EU and UK? Honestly, I'm skeptical it will have any noticeable impact on the average British person's life. I think we're overdue for a global recession anyway and thus when the UK does next tip into recession, there will be a brief argument of the form "see! we told you Brexit would create a recession" because of the timing that will be answered with, "Europe is in recession too and America is sliding, because the world economy is cyclical and we were overdue". But that will pass and I don't think Brexit will have much impact on the real economy (except maybe currency prices, which are mostly reflective of the consensus of the sort of people who are hired as traders).
The reasons are pretty simple. Firstly, free trade is less important to economies than experts tend to say. I actually work with an expert in global trade, someone whose entire job is to be a specialist in trading policies, and she's said publicly that one of the lessons learned in recent years by the field is that free trade policies seem to have less impact than they predicted.
Secondly, the UK economy is primarily services oriented and its exports especially so. Services are tariff free under WTO GATT rules so wouldn't be affected, and anyway, the EU has never really created a single market for services and selling services into the EU is difficult, so the UK is less exposed than you might think. For instance I work for a company that sells software and services, so the EU can't impose tariffs on us without exiting the WTO framework.
Thirdly, the EU actually needs UK services much more seriously than most Remainers realise (because the newspapers they tend to read don't want to admit it). For instance there was much talk of the collapse of the City right after the vote because the UK would supposedly lose its so-called financial passport i.e. the EU would ban member state firms from buying UK financial services in retaliation for the UK leaving. You don't hear much about that anymore, because the Commission folded very quickly when it became clear Brexit wouldn't be immediately cancelled and granted "temporary" permission for trade with the City to continue due to the EU's dependence on London's financial services. Likewise for air travel and a variety of other things that would supposedly all be banned outright by the EU. All given "temporary" extensions (but not much will have changed by the time these extensions expire, so what will they do then?).
Add it all up and I think it's fair to say that the people who do understand growth theory the best aren't the ones being put in front of the British public, and even they don't really understand it that well.
Even if they did though, so what? Leaving the EU isn't actually about economics to most people. Polling showed the top issues for Leave voters are immigration and sovereignty. Pretending it's merely a cost/benefit calculation to be decided by discredited economists is exactly why Remain lost. The EU is structured as a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy: the average British person, working class or not, has no say whatsoever in its decisions and the EU elites routinely enjoy reminding them of that.
On factual points, recent data [1, 2, 3] shows that the UK is actually underperforming the Eurozone in growth, including Germany
You can't compare UK GDP growth to the Eurozone directly because the Eurozone includes a lot of ex-Soviet economies that have high percentage growth because they're poor, and that pushes up the percentage-wise average. Nobody would claim Romania has a better economy than Germany though. If we compare UK and Germany directly:
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-kingdom-...
We can see that the graphs look pretty similar. The UK compares very well to the best "100% European" case. In 2018-2019 UK growth has been lower in some quarters and higher in others, although German growth benefits from an artificially weak currency vs the pound. France was doing great until Jan 2018 when growth dropped off a cliff and has never recovered (what happened there? is that the gilets jaunes?). Italy is stagnant at near zero. Spain is doing better than I expected, actually: consistent growth, albeit very low.
Of course, this misses the bigger picture. British and German growth is all peanuts compared to the USA. The UK is doing pretty well compared to other EU member states. They're all doing terribly compared to a culturally and technologically very similar country that's not in the EU. The firehose of money the NHS would get if we had American levels of growth would render most existing political bun fights irrelevant.
I don't believe the British government will actually adopt US style economic policies and get US style growth anytime soon, even if we leave the EU, but that's partly because the policy-making classes can't psychologically escape the EU's moral and social philosophies. Leaving the EU completely and then getting a good trade deal with the USA is still a necessary step if we want to get there ... and I think we do.