Young Leave voters abused online in days after European Union referendum vote

'Economic data' results from past data and models. I work with models every day - it's my job. And I know because of that they have constraints and limits. I don't think that economists are necessarily wrong - I voted leave fully expecting an economic downturn in the short term. That said, I don't believe they can predict 30 years into the future with any degree of accuracy - the uncertainty over that time scale is enormous. An economic model is not scientific, despite what the press seems to think. You can't rerun the current day to see if the same things happen again, after all. Policy decisions by the government will have a huge impact on where the country as a whole moves.

This is the Treasury economic model data. I looked at it, and looked at the equations in detail - they're on page 158. I am not an economist, but I can tell as someone who does a lot of maths and computer modelling every day, small variations of those coefficients will have a big effect on the final answer you get.

So in the end, I based my vote on this - I think that the impact policy decisions the government take in the next 10-20 years will have a bigger impact on where our economy is going to be 30, 40 and 50 years. I don't believe that we can know with any certainty that the assumptions made are valid - though I don't agree with the UKIP-y view that people are being dishonest - they're just working with the best data that they have. On balance, therefore, my decision was not based so much on the economic case.

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