Here’s the first paragraph of Tunku Varadarajan’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
Of all the lazy criticisms of Brexit, the laziest is that those who voted to leave the European Union were being “emotional,†not rational. You hear it said most often in London, which voted overwhelmingly to remain.
Of course it’s emotional. Would you want it to be anything else? De gustibus non disputandum goes back 2,000 years. It has been recognized that to be human is to have irrational preferences.
Do you know what are rational (or should be)? Corporate balance sheets. When decisions about the future of a nation are made rationally you have a corporation not a nation. In the history of the world has anyone ever willingly given his life for a corporation?
I disagree with the statement for another reason. London did not vote overwhelmingly to remain.
Greater London: 59.93% Remain
West Midlands: 59.26% Leave
For comparison, Hillary Clinton won 83.7% of the votes in Chicago in 2016, and probably had similar results in other major cities. I think such impressions misrepresent the cross-cutting cleavages that help make the Brexit issue intractable, and personal since its not very difficult to know people who voted differently than you.
“Do you know what are rational (or should be)? Corporate balance sheets. ”
Glad you added should be. Maximizing income for senior management is too often the real goal. I guess you could argue that is rational, but certainly not the theoretical purpose of most public corporations.
Steve