I'm not sure that the electorate are educated well enough though - pro-brexit votes were higher in poorer, less-well educated areas (there was a strong linear correlation between the two published in The Economist).
Agree with your general points but would add that print media heavily influencing uneducated people allows any narrative to be justified.
What's scary that if this is true, if the electorate is too silly to vote the right people in, it's only going to get worse.
Populist leaders are unlikely to fund schools properly, because it's not in their interest to do so, it's not in their interest to have an educated voting base, and on it will go.
I guess eventually, a champion will come from someewhere and help rectify the situation, but who knows how long this will take.
In reality it would be more accurate to call the vast majority of pro Brexit voters ill informed .. and to lay the blame for that on those in power that initiated the entire ill conceived referendum.
The post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels", many were not at all clear on the actual pros and cons, they were swayed by emotive nationalistic propaganda that simplified the question down to "are you proud of your country or not" .. which was almost entirely orthogonal to the reality being voted on "do you want to be part of a free trade union or not" (simplified of course but more accurate).
> post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no
idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national
poll of the feels"
It's remarkable isn't it, just how fragmented non-broadcast mass media
had become at this point? Huge swathes of people in London had no
real idea that an important vote was taking place, or what it meant -
being busy working and distracted by social media frivolity. The fact
that their chosen 'channels' simply did not 'feed' them vital
information allowed millions to be hoodwinked.
We still need a postmortem on "Brexit" as a kind of nation
healing. All of us, on both sides, were victims of information
warfare/abuse of one kind or another.
It depends on the issue. Immigration has caused real problems among the lower earners and free movement prevented any curbs.
IMHO on this the EU put ideology before pragmatism in 2004 and the British government has also massively screwed up by being the only country (ok, also Ireland) not to put any restrictions when that was possible.
Then, obviously Merkel's open door policy in 2015 did not help at all...
Note that the result of the referendum was not binding. But it did not matter: democratically and politically you cannot organise such a referendum then ignore the result because you don't like it.
You're confusing educated with "educated". Proximity to the university system breeds pro-EU attitudes because the EU enforces a similar ideology in Europe to that found in universities. There's however plenty of people who are educated in the sense of having knowledge, skills, but who aren't close to the university system, who dislike the EU and voted against it.
Arguably the practice of conflating university degrees with education is harmful. Increasingly universities seem to focus on anything but education.
>Proximity to the university system breeds pro-EU attitudes because the EU enforces a similar ideology in Europe to that found in universities
That's an interesting claim - do you have evidence to justify it?
Not disagreeing entirely that degree holders benefit from EU membership based on the type of work degrees lead to, but in reality so do people without degrees if the economy is growing. There's really no economic argument for leaving the EU; it seems like it was purely ideological.
Perhaps? I'm not sure what you have in mind as evidence. These are large scale constitutional and social issues, and what I stated is mostly my own opinion. I can elaborate if you like.
I didn't say exactly that degree holders benefit from EU membership. Although they are more likely to want to move abroad than non-degree holders the numbers of Brits who do so are just overwhelmingly trivial. It's just not a factor in Brexit either way; freedom of movement was always more of a theoretical issue for wealthy Brits and a practical one for those in the trades due to competition from the east.
There were actually lots of economic arguments for leaving the EU, that's one of the primary themes I remember about the debates. EU being overly regulation happy, unconcerned with growth, protectionist, etc. But I noticed that this is a common pattern with the pro-EU people. They don't say, "I disagree with argument X" they aren't aware the arguments existed at all.
Not sure if this is an option, bit I have a pixel 3 Android and have explored a few custom launchers to achieve this.
Currently I use "minimalist phone", I've also used Siempo. Both are amazing, cut down on phone clutter and allow you to aggressively manage notifications.
The article points this out, yes, but Dan and his organization do not. By "anywhere" I meant on his website, in the documentation around the test, or in any of his organizations communication in advertising this test. It's clearly not included in the million social media posts around this, and 99% of people seeing this video won't know this.
It's definitely not a perfect solution, but one approach could have been for the author to use a consumer Gmail account and to have set up the gsuite account as an alias.
Also it is (and was) the only English speaking country in the eurozone.
Tax was a huge factor in drawing some of the big names but the double-Irish (the worst aspect of tax avoidance) had been phased out. Corporate tax is 12.5% which is lower than the majority of EU countries [1] but the existing ecosystem of companies has also helped create an attractive labour pool. If it's purely tax everyone would move to Hungary (9%).
A number of European countries have near 100% English literacy and allow for document workflow and accounting in English. I suspect it's mostly the taxes.
I totally agree that English can be used entirely for businesses in other euro countries but for a US company it is attractive for employees/families to be in country where English is an official language.
> The EF EPI calculates a country’s/region's average adult English skill level using data from three different versions of the EF SET. Two versions are open to any Internet user for free. The third is an online placement test used by EF during the enrollment process for English courses.
> In order to calculate a country’s EF EPI score, each test score was normalized to obtain the percentage of correct answers for that test. All the scores for a country/region were then averaged across the three tests, giving equal weight to each test. Regional and global averages were weighted by the populations of each country/region within each region.
People who don't know english in the first place won't have any reason for taking those tests.
In my experience (many years on the east coast as an immigrant) I found people very friendly.
I felt like people cared less about where you are from and what you do (blue collar/white collar) compared to my home country.
In some larger cities, specialized blue-collar workers can earn high wages (home-repair type work) due to a shortage of these skills in high cost-of-living areas.
To help build up a credit score you can register for a credit-card and try to use it as much as possible (paying it off in full each month). Once you build up a paper-trail it gets easier, but can be tricky to start.
Agree with your general points but would add that print media heavily influencing uneducated people allows any narrative to be justified.