On Newsnight last night,
the Daily Mail's Stephen Glover and a philosophy professor called Barry Smith
were discussing Labour MP Barry Sheerman's statement that most of those who
voted Remain in June's EU referendum "were the better educated people in
our country".
They discussed the fact
that a high proportion of Remainers were university educated students, and that
among the 'intellectual' demographic a high proportion of them are left wing -
by which I assume they mean economically left wing (they never said).
Both contributors spent
their time analysing why so many students are left wing, whether they are being
coerced or compelled by university lecturers, whether those lecturers suffered
heavily from confirmation bias, and why young people begin as lefties but end
up much further to the right when they have grown up, had some more
life experience, become smarter and more worldly lived a few more
years.
Yet both failed to arrive
at the primary and most obvious reason why young people start as lefties and
undergo a gradual metamorphosis into capitalists - it's because when they are
young they have no capital, and do not feel the costs of the policies they
support (they might feel differently if they understood why it is their older
selves that will end up paying for socialist policies anyway, but we've covered
that before).
Young people are generally
more fancifully idealistic too, with less life experience; are more easily
driven by social conformity than older people; and still at the stage when their
economic awareness aptly comes under the maxim "a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing".
Consequently, whether on
average the young people in London and Bristol who voted Remain are better
academically educated than the older people in Lincoln and Hull who voted Leave
is neither here nor there - because both groups had obvious personal incentives
for voting as they did, and turkeys are never going to have a very balanced
view on the topic of Christmas.
Because both groups had
numerous personal incentives for how they voted, it is fairly obvious that
there will be good and bad reasons why young people voted Remain, and good and
bad reasons why older people voted Leave. That's one good reason why
on this occasion it doesn't really matter all that much whether Remainers "were
the better educated people in our country" - because what makes them
better educated academically is not primarily what is behind their reasons to
vote to Remain.
If there were a statistic
released today that said half of the doctors in the NHS never studied medicine,
then it would matter, because studying medicine is a necessary requirement of
being a doctor. Studying chemistry, biology and English literature (while all
excellent subjects) has no real bearing on a person's understanding of the
merits and demerits of being in the EU, so it's a largely unimportant statistic
to bandy around.
The only really important consideration
regarding how people voted in the EU referendum is the number of voters whose
main personal interests in the result are to do with what's best for the UK as a whole, whether the EU is a net force for good or not, and more long term, what's best for the other nations
of Europe and the rest of the world too.
Even if that
proportion of the demographic that rigorously understands all this is in the tiny minority, it hardly matters at all.
Good and reliable opinion is contingent on expertise not on consensus. In a
room of 500 people where only 1% of them are particle physicists, if you're
looking for advice on Fermi–Dirac
statistics you will very likely learn more from the minority 5 than you will
the other 495 people combined - and I fancy that something similar can be said about
Brexit.
For further reading, my own contributions to
the EU referendum debate can be found on the right hand side bar, most
comprehensive is The
EU Referendum: Remain or Leave? You Might Like To Ask The Question In Another
Way
I also explained why I think One
Day Remainers Will Be Relieved Brexiteers
