Friday, June 24, 2016

Britain Votes To Leave The EU, Naive Children Hardest Hit

I've seen this stat in various forms across the Internet after the Brexit vote.

Older people favored Brexit, younger people did not.
It's usually posted by someone angry about the vote and is accompanied by chatter about how old people have screwed the younger ones. Hardly. As Jonah Goldberg notes in his book, The Tyranny of Cliches, young people are stupid. Here's the proper way to read this chart.

The more experience and wisdom you have, the more likely you were to vote for Brexit. The more naive and childlike you are, the more likely you were to vote to stay.

Reading through the Twitter stream for #Brexit, I see all kinds of shrieking and moaning about certain doom, but I can't see why. It's as if the EU was Hogwarts, the only one of its kind and without them, Britain will have no way to ... to ... to what? What exactly do buildings full of self-important suits holding meetings in Brussels do for you? Trade deals? Why can't your representatives work those out for you? Dig this.
German business leaders handed a considerable boost to the Leave campaign by saying it would be “very, very foolish” to deny the UK a free trade deal after Brexit.
The Euros want to buy British goods. They want British customers. They're not going to shut off the flow of goods and services to and from Britain. There's nothing magical about the EU.

Unless you're in your 20s and you've been raised on collectivism fairy tales. Then there's something very magical indeed. You can't say what, but you know it's magic.

1 comment:

Foxfier said...

Have you read that article by a philosophy lecturer yet?

http://the-american-catholic.com/2016/06/27/twit/

He couldn't manage to vote. Not sure if there was a practical obstacle, or if it was crippling snootiness.