[garrypettet]

As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect. There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain. No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.

[georgespencer]

> As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect.

It's interesting that a "highly educated physician" can't draw a distinction between one potentially anomalous datapoint -- their own characteristics -- and the data drawn from the characteristics of 15 million people. I had thought the makeup of the two respective movements were well-known.

Remain voters are more likely to be degree educated, and to live in a large metropolitan area which experiences significant immigration. Leave voters are more likely to be older, have tertiary college or a GCSE as their highest form of education, and live in a smaller cities, towns, and villages.

> There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain.

By and large they're shuffling about with their tails between their legs at the moment as every single fiscal institution's observations about what a disaster a "leave" vote would be comes true, but you're right and I don't dispute this. The point I made is that the aggregate view of the leave movement -- and you can find this as galling as you like -- is of an uneducated, parochial, and ageing demographic.

> No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.

This is true, and is entirely unrelated to my original post. Amongst the college-educated, Trump won men and women by the bucketload (I think the only category he didn't win was college-educated white women but it was still a close-run thing).

[cja]

Economics isn't everything. Culture, sovereignty and population density matter to many people.

[georgespencer]

Actually there's quite a body of evidence to suggest that when GDP is growing and income disparity is not significant, culture/sovereignty/immigration are not used as political footballs. When income disparity grows and GDP growth slows (or there's a recession), extremist politics -- usually centred around some sort of binary opposition -- rise. I.e. economics is everything, and people only kick up a fuss about other things when times are bad.

> Sovereignty

In purely semantic terms we are a sovereign nation irrespective of our EU membership. So it would be useful for you to unpack exactly what you mean by sovereignty. (IIRC the only way to violate one's sovereignty are: harbouring terrorists, invading a neighbouring country, violating the genocide convention, breaking nuclear non-proliferation.)

> Population density

Population density is fascinating to me because when you look at the 6m or so foreign-born workers in the UK, only 1.9m of them come from the EU. Bans on India, China, and Pakistan would be better ways to reduce population density. And, of course, if you removed all of the foreign born workers in the UK, you would see a massive reduction of… 24 people per km2.

I always thought people really cared about immigration's perceived drain on welfare. Which is why it's so funny that EEA migrants either a) overwhelmingly pay for themselves (pro-Remain numbers) or b) almost pay for themselves and certainly do a better job of it than the average UK national (pro-Leave numbers). Of the 7% of non-UK nationals who take up the welfare budget, Pakistanis are more likely to receive benefits than any other nation, and in the top 10 there's only three or four EEA nations.

> Culture

Left this one until last. The culture of Britain hasn't changed for the worse since Enoch Powell in the 1960s, Paki bashing in the 1970s, monkey chants from the football terraces in the 1980s, has it?