Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: A Divided Nation

Must-Read: Why did England ex-London vote so overwhelmingly for Brexit? I cannot say that I understand it. Simon Wren-Lewis tries to strategize for a way forward:

Simon Wren-Lewis: A Divided Nation:

Economists and others who voted Remain are quite right to say “I told you so” as the economic hit they expected comes to pass….

The Brexit Bust needs to be labelled clearly, given the power the Leave side has over the means of communication. (Those behind that campaign are already talking utter nonsense in order to pretend it had nothing to do with them.) But those who voted Remain also need to understand why they lost….

Education and age are key determinates: if you are less educated or older you tend to vote Leave. Both matter independently…. Once you take these into account, income is not a significant factor.

Geography matters in key ways. One of those is that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland were much less likely to want to leave (controlling for other factors). The other I will come to…. Areas with a recent large increase in immigration are more likely to vote leave, [but] more work needs to be done on whether its actual level matters. However, even if it matters, it does not matter that much…. The Leave vote increases in areas where there is a lot of poverty and local inequality….

There is no reason why we need to choose between the economic and the social types of explanation…. Antagonism to the idea (rather than the actuality) of migration [could be] the way an underlying grievance got translated into a dislike of the EU…. Economic arguments were important for Remain voters. The economic message did get through to many…. The NHS was important to Leave voters, so the point economists also made that ending free movement would harm the NHS was either not believed or did not get through…. Whether [leavers] did not know about the overwhelming consensus among economists who thought [Brexit would be bad], or chose to ignore it, we cannot tell…. Leave voters are far more pessimistic about the future, and also tend to believe that life today is much worse than life 30 years ago…. Those who thought the following were a source of ill rather than good–multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, globalisation, the internet, the green movement and immigration–tended by large majorities to vote Leave…. Leave voters were those left behind in modern society in either an economic or social way (or perhaps both)…