As the divorce between Britain and the European Union moves closer to its final deadline of March 2019, a number of observations can be made regarding the fallout. The overly optimistic “Leavers” and the forcefully hysterical “Remainers” are both wrong. For the most part, we cannot know what the future brings.

Impact Assessments Are the Pretense of Knowledge

When you have people vote on an issue, you can always criticize what they ended up voting for in three different ways:

The first one has been ticked off already. During the first weeks after the vote, EU supporters ran with the narrative that Brexiteers were uninformed. Their go-to proof: thousands of people googled what the EU is, the day after the vote. This idea, so popular for among those who want to discredit the vote, even picked up by media outlets in the US, turned out to be a partisan way of reading a chart. Steve Patterson points out in his viral blog post that:

The article claims that searches for “What is the EU?” within Britain had “more than tripled” in the hours after the referendum. Did nobody ask: tripled from what number? Well, when you look at the data Google provides, it looks like less than 1000 Brits made that Google search.

The United Kingdom is currently stuck somewhere between step 2 and 3. On one hand, EU-supporters claim that “Leave” voters were unaware that leaving the EU would result in leaving the European single market (despite the former Prime Minister David Cameron insisting quite strongly on this), which is an integral part of the European Union, and that those who oppose the EU willfully ignore the economic impact of Brexit. You surely have to love that people who never analyzed the European Union for its economic advantage or disadvantage and always labeled those who questioned the supposed merit of this political union as backward and bigoted have suddenly fallen in love with economics.