The Remain campaign should be bulletproof. It benefits from

• The formal support of the government
• The support of virtually all world leaders
• The support of the economics profession, academia, and many other intellectuals
• EU leaders proclaiming that they will have no mercy on “deserters” and that they would refuse to negotiate with Britain post exit
• Frequent and uncontested predictions of economic doom after an exit
• A litany of celebrities lining up to endorse it
• The support of many leading broadsheet newspapers
• A divided and weak Leave campaign, fronted by politicians that are not especially liked

Yet despite this wall of advantage, somehow it isn’t working — the polls have shown a constant rise in support for Brexit. If the UK does vote to remain, it will probably be by a very small margin.

This isn’t because the Leave campaign is doing such a great job. Both campaigns have been awful. Pro-Leave campaigners have been rightfully accused of playing fast and loose with spending statistics, making absurd claims and sometimes just being offensive. Pro-Remain supporters have found themselves literally arguing that:

“Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilization in its entirety”

— Donald Tusk

Let’s take a moment to ponder that this wasn’t posted by some idiot on Twitter, it was said by the President of the EU Parliament himself. Game over, The Onion.

But whilst the basic things that motivate people are clear, what isn’t clear is why opinion has shifted towards Leave so rapidly. I’m going to hazard a guess or two about what’s going on.

One issue seems simple enough: pro-Remain supporters have adopted a psychologically catastrophic set of arguments which are triggering a strong backlash against their position. By arguing that the UK is weak, dependent, unable to go it alone and locked into a community of “friends” who will strongly retaliate if the British decide to move on, the EU is triggering people’s natural rebelliousness. We are all taught as children that clubs you can join but not leave are very dangerous: they’re normally called gangs or cults. And our culture teaches us to value strength, independence, knowing your own mind and having the courage of your convictions. By positioning the referendum as “if we go we’ll be made to regret it”, Cameron and Osborne have painted the EU in a way that many people would instantly consider problematic if it were a story about individuals rather than countries.

But more importantly, the British people have lost confidence in their establishment intellectuals. And for good reasons, which I will examine in a moment. So the constant barrage of pro-Remain announcements and articles by academics, experts, officials and other elites are not having the intended effect, and may even be having the opposite effect. This will be something that influences all of politics heavily in future and is worth serious attention.

On experts

Until the last couple of weeks, the most common sentiment from EU supporters has been “Of course the UK will remain. To leave would be stupid, insane and suicidal so there is no real chance of Brexit”.

How could Remain be so complacent?

The biggest reason has to be the assumption of intellectual superiority. Remain must win, so the thinking goes, because everyone-who-is-anyone supports it and disagreeing with all of those experts and authorities would be to disagree with civilisation itself.

But this assumption has proven to be dangerously misguided. The British, like many populations, have been losing confidence in their elites and are no longer minded to simply delegate complicated decisions to them. Unlike David Cameron, his cabinet colleague Michael Gove understands this trend and explained it during a national TV debate like this:

“People in this country have had enough of experts!”

This remark has been taken as de-facto evidence that anyone who is not pro-EU is mentally retarded or driven by emotion rather than reason. It triggered another round of backslapping complacency amongst Remain supporters: look at how superior we are!

The idea that Gove might actually be right, that people might actually have had enough of experts in this debate, was apparently an idea too appalling to analyse. Let’s sacrifice a few sacred cows and do so.

I suspect Gove is right, and more importantly that this behaviour is not irrational, unreasonable or anti-intellectual. We are not living in Idiocracy. It is the result of two things:

1. When experts are asked to give their opinions on a topic they analyze it exclusively from the perspective of their specialism and ignore all other factors.
2. The social groups that make up the intellectual elites have blown their credibility to pieces in the last ten years, with the result that many people now perceive them as self-proclaimed “experts” in name only.

Understanding this is key to understanding why the repetitive testimony of experts is not having the intended effect.

The first point is simple enough. When an economist is asked what they think of leaving the EU they give an answer based on economics only; when a business leader is asked they give an answer based on the needs of their business only, when Obama is asked he is only thinking about what America wants, and so on. Their predictions must be based on an extremely limited analysis and must assume a static environment in which nothing else changes because they are not experts in other fields nor can they predict the future.

Imagine if an economist said “I predict a tough negotiator would force the EU to cut a good deal by exploiting rising anti-EU feeling in Sweden and the Netherlands, so Brexit would be good for the economy”. This would be a political prediction well outside the remit of his/her speciality and so would no longer seem like an expert opinion, but more like the sort of opinion anyone could have. To preserve the voice of detached authority that makes someone an expert, they must act as if nothing outside their area of knowledge matters or can possibly change.

Likewise, when someone who runs a business is asked about leaving the EU, their analysis must necessarily be only about the immediate impact on their business. They can’t say, “paperwork would get more complicated but it’d be worth it to cut immigration”, even if that might be their actual opinion, because this would not be a narrow judgement only on their area of expertise — it would be a blended judgement weighing other factors which they are not an expert on.

But voters aren’t being asked to analyse the EU from a single perspective. They’re being asked to blend and weigh all factors both now and into the future as they change. This is a far tougher question than anything being posed to any expert, and means the average voter must consider many factors that each individual expert answer deliberately ignores. And even if the man down the pub can’t fully articulate that, he still intuitively understands it — making the opinion of any specific expert at best incomplete and at worst potentially misleading.

But the establishment has bigger problems than an abundance of overly narrow analyses.

Let’s examine a few groups of supposed intellectuals. They’ve all poured burning petrol on their own credibility over the past decade, with the result that tens of millions of Britons may nod politely when they speak but in reality no longer care what they think.

Economists

The Remain campaign relies on economists more than any other group. The argument to remain is entirely economic. Economists have predicted that the British would be permanently worse off into the indefinite future if they were to leave the EU, and this is the argument to stay. The predictions of economic doom are often extremely precise, even as far out as 20 years.

Do people trust economists? No, they don’t. From the article:

Ms Sapienza and Mr Zingales note that when Americans are told what economists believe before answering a question, their view scarcely budges.

The main reason people don’t trust economists is that they failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis. Not just British economists, note, but all economic advisors in every country failed to see it coming. When 2008 came not one western government was prepared. In the UK Gordon Brown was so unprepared he famously announced he had ended the boom/bust cycle completely. How is that even possible? The answer helps make clear why people hold economists in disdain.

Economists make predictions about the future based on models. The most popular model inside governments at the time of the financial crisis was called the “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model”. This name makes it sound extremely clever. In fact, it is a pile of crap that gets laughed at by any non-expert to whom it is explained. From a 2008 research paper by the ECB:

… most workhorse general equilibrium models routinely employed in academia and policy institutions to study the dynamics of the main macroeconomic variables generally lack any interaction between financial and credit markets, on the one hand, and the rest of the economy, on the other …. These models … do not assign any role to financial intermediaries such as banks. But in reality banks play a very influential role in modern financial systems, and especially in the euro area.

Let’s repeat that. Economists failed to predict the financial crisis because their predictions ignored the existence of banks entirely.

Was this problem only obvious in hindsight? Er, no. From the DGSE wikipedia page:

Noah Smith, economics professor and author of the blog ‘noahpinion’,[17] observed that “DSGE fails the market test.” That is, financial modelers who would benefit directly from superior market returns uniformly do not use DSGE models, thus strongly suggesting that DSGE models are not useful for macroeconomic prediction.

So people making actual money completely ignored the academics and their models — probably because they knew it was groupthink-driven garbage. A few hedge fund managers saw what was coming and their story was eventually turned into a film. But the sort of experts that get cited by politicians did not.

A typical response to criticism of economics is this: “fine, but surely they can’t all be wrong”. Unfortunately, yes, they can. Like many academic fields, economics is an extremely small profession. There is really only one large employer of economists: the government. Whilst a few might toil in banks and hedge funds under different names (like “analyst”, “trader” etc), long-range macroeconomic prediction is really something only governments do at scale. Like all highly academic fields, your ability to get into it and thrive depends on building a reputation for respectability. In a market-driven field like consumer electronics a Steve Jobs type can tell literally the entire industry they’re wrong — and then prove it by minting money with the iPod. But in economics you can’t run experiments, only analyse tiny datasets which often yield inconclusive results. So your career success depends mostly on what your colleagues think of you and your theories. This creates a massive incentive to not rock the boat. The group starts hiring the in-crowd and rapidly self-selects for intellectual homogeneity.

Without a doubt the British do believe that leaving the EU will involve economic pain, because EU leaders have made it clear they would retaliate against an exit and trade barriers are the only tool they have. But you don’t need to be an expert to understand that trade is good. Beyond pointing out that trade is good, it’s unclear economists have much to add. Believing specific predictions about the impact on house prices or GDP 20 years from now would require us to believe that economists can accurately predict the future, despite their abject failure to do so … or even to correct the failures that led to their failures!

So people are right to assign low weights to what economists think. By treating the single-factor analyses of a discredited group as if only retards could argue with them, Remain has undermined their case from the beginning.

Politicians and journalists

The ill repute of economics feeds another problem: when politicians and journalists present economic predictions as cast-iron facts it undermines trust in them too. And it’s not like they had a lot to start with!

Here’s an example from the UK government website:

“Treasury analysis on the EU shows UK will be worse off by £4,300 a year per household if Britain votes to leave, the Chancellor explains.”

The same speech states, “The Treasury’s rigorous analysis of the trade and investment impact of the WTO option shows that after 15 years Britain’s economy would be around 7.5% smaller.”

These are extremely specific predictions by the staff at HM Treasury. But is the Treasury’s advice credible? I guess George Osborne would say yes … oh, wait. From a BBC News article in 2010:

Mr Osborne said the newly formed independent Office for Budget Responsibility would publish economic and fiscal forecasts, rather than the government — the first of which would come out before the Budget.

He predicted it would create a “rod for my back down the line and for future chancellors” but said the current system did not produce “good Budgets”, and Labour’s economic forecasts had mostly been wrong and “almost always in the wrong direction”.

[Alistair Darling] said: “The suggestion that Treasury officials colluded with us in perverting figures is just wrong…

In 2010 one of George Osborne’s first acts as Chancellor was to establish a brand new quango for economic forecasting, the “Office for Budget Responsibility”. His justification was that the Treasury told politicians whatever they wanted to hear, and was so overrun with yes-men that this was completely unfixable. That’s pretty bad.

Worse, it’s not really clear why the OBR was expected to be somehow “not government” or less likely to pander to politicians. Sure enough, if we check the organisation’s history, we find that the initial staff was made up of 8 former Treasury officials. So independent!

There are lots of examples like this. I’m not picking a narrow fight with the specific speech quoted above. I want to make a broader point — that when politicians and columnists pump up the opinions of people they know to be unreliable to benefit from their aura of authority, they undermine not only trust in themselves but in the wider notion of experts as well.

Gove is right. People have learned the hard way that when politicians repeat apparently authoritative arguments by expert economists, they are often wrong. The trust is gone … and both groups thoroughly deserve it.