What is success? High YOY GDP growth? Or quality of life? Look to America (my country) with very limited worker protections, almost no social safety nets, extremely high income and wealthy inequality; we still only eek out only ~2% GDP growth, and that's on the backs of the poor.
Freedom has a cost, and it seems that the UK populace who voted to leave does not fully understand that cost.
In the US, those are all going the opposite directions.
When countries grow powerful, they begin to forget about the "socio" part of socioeconomics, and just look at dollars.
Clearly a very, very large portion of the country felt underserved by the model.
Nassim taleb sums it up well: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/15/nassim-taleb-the-global-re...
I'd argue you might be able to have a generous social safety net if you adopted a high tax, low regulation approach.
EU is high tax high regulation, US is medium tax medium regulation.
How about measuring by success by the preferences of the people in the country? Apparently a majority of UK voters preferred leaving.
You can educate someone. You can't fix willful ignorance.
> Gotta hand it to stupid people. They may not understand nuance, secondary effects, or the long term, but dammit, they know how to vote.