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.