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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

There are many measures of success, and if you want to talk about quality of life, by all means look at how bad the discontentment with the EU has been growing over the years, among all member states. Keeping everyone in the EU is not sustainable.

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Show me a model you'd replicate. I will argue that Britain was the model I'd replicate. Was.

I'm not playing politics, but in my take any movement that distances you from a remote central power is positive in the end. Freedom should have been the basis for the EU, not Socialism. We all know where it's headed now.

Is the supposed freedom worth it if your country's economy suffers? I'm not asking for political reasons either, I'm talking purely economical.

Freedom has a cost, and it seems that the UK populace who voted to leave does not fully understand that cost.

Freedom is an investment. Of course the UK will be worse in short run, and I'm sure EU members will poit fingers and say "we told you so!". But in the long run they will be better off than the rest of Europe, where structural changes have proven impossible. Such decisions take dozens of years to give fruit.

What metric would you use to measure if the UK was more successful out of the EU then in? I'm looking for an objective metric that can be measured.

GDP's not perfect, but that should hint at a number of things. Look also at Organic Inflation, and Debt Ratio. Unless the UK governments to come take much worse decisions than the EU bureaucrats, it should not be too difficult to do better.

Median wages up, economic inequality down, investments in social stability programs (retirement, healthcare, education) up.

In the US, those are all going the opposite directions.

Your economy can boom with all the citizens suffering. For example, if average wages go down, and the rich get richer, the overall economy grows, but is of little consequence to most people.

When countries grow powerful, they begin to forget about the "socio" part of socioeconomics, and just look at dollars.

So, every town and village should build a wall and secede?

If you replicated Britain it'd just vote itself out again.

Clearly a very, very large portion of the country felt underserved by the model.

Britain is not the first country to be led into darkness by fear.

Funny how such decisions always assume Fear and never Englightment.

I have yet to see any data that the Brexit is a net positive for the economical wellbeing of the British people. That is not what I'd define as "Enlightened".

No one has any data one way or the other, and will not for at least ten years. The UK entered uncharted territory. Your guess regarding what the future holds is about as good as anyone's, including those of the experts.

People are sick of biased crap and vague economic theory being touted as data telling them how good immigration and free trade is for them, while in their own lives only seeing things getting worse.

Nassim taleb sums it up well: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/15/nassim-taleb-the-global-re...

There's more to wellbeing than (relatively) short-term economic wellbeing.

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