In the UK’s European Union membership referendum, the voting pattern was heavily correlated with age: older people were much more likely to vote to leave the EU than younger people. My current (poorly informed) understanding is that, in terms of the correlation between age and conservatism, both aging itself and cohort effects play a role. If the latter is significant in this case, this suggests that, in twenty years’ time, most of Britain’s electorate will be in favour of being part of the EU. If so, then a huge amount of time and effort will have been wasted in the transition costs of leaving and rejoining.
First of all I think using live political examples like this is not a great idea.
It also seems possible to me (though I am less certain) that the ‘older people are rightfully more sceptical of official cost estimates’ alternative theory I described in this comment might apply here. One of the key arguments against Brexit was that it would lead to a high degree of short-term disruption, due to uncertainty, disruptions to supply chains, and a loss of export markets on the continent. In contrast, many of the benefits, like protection from further institutional decline in the EU, were longer-term.
Yet after the fact it is worth noting that many of the anti-Brexit forecasts for immediate large negative consequences have been proved wrong, at least so far. For example the Treasury forecast that unemployment would rise by 520,000 after a Leave vote, whereas in actual fact the UK labour market has improved significantly since then.
There’s also a big difference between wanting to Remain and wanting to Rejoin later on:
Once the UK has left, the transition issues will be sunk costs—indeed transition costs will become a reason to not rejoin!
Status quo bias will switch to supporting independence.
The outside view also suggests the UK would want to remain independent, as the other independent western european countries like Norway, Iceland and Switzerland have become if anything less likely to join now than they were in the past (see for example here and here).
This also seems to be the case in the UK—for example, the idea of joining the Euro, despite being supported by the Conservative Party in 1990 and Tony Blair later, has been totally discredited even among Remain supporters.
So overall I don’t think Brexit-related temporal inconsistency is a great reason to support increasing the weight on younger voters.
First of all I think using live political examples like this is not a great idea.
I don’t think that a blanket ban on live political examples is a great norm. There are definite risks from tribalism from doing so, but we also just have a lot more information with which to test our views (compared to, say, how age-weighted voting would have affected the French Revolution). If we’re worried about tribalism, we should just call tribalism out directly, rather than ban certain topics.
In this particular case, I found that thinking about Brexit and the Scottish Independence Referendum helpful to test my starting intuitions. In particular, it somewhat weakened my adherence to my starting assumption of rational self-interest of voters’ political positions—I don’t really see the age-related discrepancies in people’s votes on Brexit and Scottish Independence as being well explained by whether the position involves short-term benefits for long-term harms. (Rather than, say, by how much weight one puts on national sovereignty, which is a political view that might just go in and out of fashion.)
First of all I think using live political examples like this is not a great idea.
It also seems possible to me (though I am less certain) that the ‘older people are rightfully more sceptical of official cost estimates’ alternative theory I described in this comment might apply here. One of the key arguments against Brexit was that it would lead to a high degree of short-term disruption, due to uncertainty, disruptions to supply chains, and a loss of export markets on the continent. In contrast, many of the benefits, like protection from further institutional decline in the EU, were longer-term.
Yet after the fact it is worth noting that many of the anti-Brexit forecasts for immediate large negative consequences have been proved wrong, at least so far. For example the Treasury forecast that unemployment would rise by 520,000 after a Leave vote, whereas in actual fact the UK labour market has improved significantly since then.
There’s also a big difference between wanting to Remain and wanting to Rejoin later on:
Once the UK has left, the transition issues will be sunk costs—indeed transition costs will become a reason to not rejoin!
Status quo bias will switch to supporting independence.
The outside view also suggests the UK would want to remain independent, as the other independent western european countries like Norway, Iceland and Switzerland have become if anything less likely to join now than they were in the past (see for example here and here).
This also seems to be the case in the UK—for example, the idea of joining the Euro, despite being supported by the Conservative Party in 1990 and Tony Blair later, has been totally discredited even among Remain supporters.
So overall I don’t think Brexit-related temporal inconsistency is a great reason to support increasing the weight on younger voters.
I don’t think that a blanket ban on live political examples is a great norm. There are definite risks from tribalism from doing so, but we also just have a lot more information with which to test our views (compared to, say, how age-weighted voting would have affected the French Revolution). If we’re worried about tribalism, we should just call tribalism out directly, rather than ban certain topics.
In this particular case, I found that thinking about Brexit and the Scottish Independence Referendum helpful to test my starting intuitions. In particular, it somewhat weakened my adherence to my starting assumption of rational self-interest of voters’ political positions—I don’t really see the age-related discrepancies in people’s votes on Brexit and Scottish Independence as being well explained by whether the position involves short-term benefits for long-term harms. (Rather than, say, by how much weight one puts on national sovereignty, which is a political view that might just go in and out of fashion.)