Tim Harford: belief

Transcript context

…And there’s your own book, right? Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, a great book — the notion that you want experimentation. A lot of the experiments, at first, may not look so great, but over time, you have more wisdom in the system with more distinct units of governance. If anyone should be at least sympathetic to the Brexit cause, it would be you. No? Yeah, but again, it depends what level you’re measuring these things at. I’ve seen a paper from maybe 20 years ago now, American Economic Review. If you can agree to global standards, this empowers smaller economic units. You can have city states; you can have small nation states. And to some extent, the European Union potentially allows that. It was much more credible to suggest, for example, that Scotland could break away from the rest of the UK when the whole lot was in the EU. And the ambiguity of whether Northern Ireland is in the UK — well, legally, politically it’s in the UK, but it’d be nice to pretend that it’s also part of Ireland. A lot of people would like that. Well, you can have your cake and eat it if you’re in the EU. The EU prevents certain kinds of experiments, but it allows other kinds of experiments. I don’t see that as decisively cutting either way. I should also say in Adapt, I do emphasize the importance of small experiments that give you a tremendous amount of information at the lowest possible cost. And I’m not sure Brexit has yet qualified, but I think you could say that about the EU as well. The EU’s clearly not a small experiment at a small cost. It’s a very big experiment. If something like the Boris Johnson plan passes through Parliament — and that might even have happened by the time this podcast comes out — do you think the Scots will leave the United Kingdom?…

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