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[–] flat_hedgehog 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

No, you cannot have my email address. I have given you an upvoat for typing all that out though. Given that the majority of your peers voted to Remain, I'll hazard a guess that you are a student. I will ignore the insults and try to respond to your arguments.

Britain's creditworthiness is not a issue. We borrow in our own currency and borrowing rates are at an all-time low. There will be extra costs to borrowing but I view that as a smaller issue that the amount our country will save from not sending money to the EU, not financially supporting many EU migrants,etc. We do need to balance the budget but that is a different issue.

The pound has fallen slightly against the dollar. It was artificially high to begin with at $1.49 so part of the drop was market correction. The other part was panic. Traders have nerves of tissue paper. Told to panic by the UK government's doom-mongering, they panic. Computer traders see a fall and follow. Once everyone realises that the sky hasn't fallen, people will re-invest.

The pound falling is bad for imports (foreign businesses' profit) but good for exports (UK businesses' profit). Guess which of those I care about. If it costs more to buy bacon from Denmark, I will buy bacon from a UK farm. Spending money within the country supports jobs here.

We need to negotiate trade deals. Fine. All non-EU countries have to negotiate their trade deals. It happens. EU countries do not want to stop selling us their goods. France will continue to sell us wine. China will continue to buy our whisky and salmon.

There were plenty of academics who didn't want us to leave the EU. They may be experts in top-line economics and in their fields but that doesn't mean that the view point of the less formally-educated is irrelevant. I resent anyone telling me that my experiences with rising rent, over-crowded public transport, inability to get a GP appointment are invalid because I don't have a PhD.

Some advice for the future - don't call everyone who disagrees with you stupid. It won't win anyone round to your point of view.

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[–] TelescopiumHerscheli ago 

Thank you for response. Your guess that I'm a student is wrong, though I do have lots of students ranging from callow first-year undergrads upwards. Very few of them would have made the mistake that you made.

I think you're being disingenuous when you say the pound has "fallen slightly" when it's one of the biggest falls in living memory. Certainly there has been some profit-taking, but it's likely that the underlying trend for sterling is still down. Your remark about algorithmic trading is partly right: there are many "trend-following" trading algorithms, but these algorithms have been falling as a proportion of all algorithmic trading over the last decade or so as more sophisticated models have been introduced. On balance it's a moot point whether algorithmic trading has amplified or reduced the impact of the Brexit news in the FX markets. A weak point in your citing the impact of computer-driven trading is that it fails to appreciate how many of the more modern approaches work: they only act on the basis of formally structured information of particular kinds (e.g. specific economic figures), so haven't yet had a chance to react to Brexit, as we don't have any new economic data of the right kind to trigger them. This will change in the months ahead.

It is actually exactly because of your "experiences with rising rent, over-crowded public transport, inability to get a GP appointment" and so on that your decision process is invalid. You, like many other less reflective people, confuse your particular experience with that of the country as a whole. Similarly, many less reflective people can't effectively think in terms of "counterfactuals" ("what would have happened if..."). These are common problems amongst what we can, for short, call "stupid people". Stupid people can't think clearly, and make decisions on the basis of a whole range of unhelpful behaviours (what we sometimes call "cognitive biases"). This is what you did when you cast your stupid vote: you looked at the world through the lens of your own limited view, rather than taking the broader view.

Don't get me wrong: academic economists suffer from exactly the same cognitive biases and tendencies to e.g. focus on anecdotal data rather than carefully compiled statistics. I have to work really hard to think abstractly, and so do all my colleagues. Most of being an "intellectual" or a "social liberal" or whatever is learning to think clearly and without bias. This is difficult, which is why most people don't do it. It's certainly why many many pro-Brexit voters cast their stupid votes.

It is possible to stop being stupid, but it takes tremendous work. I have the good fortune to work for an institution that only accepts very high quality students, and even then it's a real struggle to get most of them to think clearly and critically.

I imagine you think I'm "arrogant" for what I'm saying here. Actually, you are the arrogant one: you imagined that your ability to make decisions about an incredibly complex economic and social issue was better than that of all those hundreds of experts from all those different industries and academies. Would you think you were better than a surgeon who's trained for years? Would you even think you know more about plumbing than one of those cheap, well-trained Polish plumbers you worry about? Then why on earth did you think you knew more about economic and social issues than those highly educated, intelligent, hard-working people who told you over and over what the risks were? Certainly there are some people whose PhDs have contributed nothing to their minds (I'm thinking of one particular ex-colleague!), but generally having higher qualifications and having spent more time studying is a good indicator that these people know what they're talking about. When smart people speak, it's stupid to ignore them.

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[–] flat_hedgehog 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I see. You're not a naive student, you're an arrogant professor and everyone is stupider than you. Are you bitter that I have the same vote as you? If you are genuinely a professor, make this a teaching experience for your students. Considering the experiences, opinions and priorities of others will expand their minds.

I'd love to have an intelligent discussion but, as you have deemed my experiences and decisions invalid and me stupid, what's the point?