It suggests that we should not find either the Brexit vote or Trump’s election a surprise. Once we recognise that a large proportion of (most?) voters are not that interested and therefore not that informed about politics, and then ask what information these voters actually received from the media, then both Brexit and Trump were quite rational choices.
.. We ask how can half of those who voted in the EU referendum opt for evident self-harm, because we have read that economists think it will be self harm by a margin of 22 to 1. But if all you have seen is he said/she said reporting in the media, it just looks like economists are divided on the issue.
.. In 2015 voters elected a Conservative government because they thought they were more competent at running the economy. They blamed Labour for causing austerity. Pretty well all the evidence suggested the opposite was true. But all most people heard was the Conservative narrative about ‘clearing up the mess’
.. The power of a simple but false narrative is immense: remember most workers had experienced an unprecedented fall their real earnings over this period, yet they still chose to blame Labour for this rather than the global financial crisis and austerity.
Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class
He also had a narrative about his own life. It’s not the agency narrative you often find in the professional segments of society: I found my passion and steered my own ship. It’s more of a reactive, coping narrative: A lot of the big forces were outside my control, but I adjusted, made the best of what was possible within my constraints and lived up to my responsibilities.
.. But now there is a stochastic, episodic nature to many careers. As workers get older, potential employers become more suspicious of their skills, not more confident in them. As a result, you often meet people who had been happiest at work in middle age, and then moved down to a series of positions they were overqualified for and felt diminished in.
.. Suburbia isn’t working. During the baby boom, the suburbs gave families safe places to raise their kids. But now we are in an era of an aging population, telecommuting workers and single-person households.
.. The culture and geography of suburbia are failing to nurture webs of mutual dependence.
Yes, Even Your Company Video Needs Conflict
If a company doesn’t set up conflicts before addressing how their brand handles those issues, the content they’re producing ends up predictable, dry, and boring. If the stakes are low, the content risks resembling a laundry list of bland talking points: “We’re the best!” and “You should really work with us.” It’s immediately lost in the noise of an oversaturated market.
But, if a company instead 1) successively introduces problems, and then 2) passionately showcases how their team attacks those problems, the stories they tell are likely to be bold and unique to their brand.
.. Stories need to be transformative. What makes a story transformative is when it solves a problem that exists because of conflict.
.. It might make you feel vulnerable to discuss hindrances, but it will ultimately make your solutions stronger and your company’s story more human.
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
With the exceptions of London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, every major region of the U.K. voted to exit the E.U.
.. One of the best predictors of how people voted was their education level. Those with college degrees tended to opt for Remain, while people without them tended to opt for Leave.
.. The older and poorer you are, the more likely you were to vote Leave. The younger and richer you are, the more likely you were to vote Remain.
.. The Leave side went up in the polls after it managed to shift the debate away from the likely economic impact of Brexit and onto immigration and issues of national sovereignty. Although much of the immigration into the U.K. comes from outside of the E.U., the Leave forces were able to focus attention on the freedom of movement for workers, which is one of the founding principles of the E.U.
.. economic anxieties and resentments underpinned the political anger that fuelled the Leave vote. Demagogues such as Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, were able to exploit these economic worries, directing them against immigrants and other easy targets.
.. the best predictor of voting patterns wasn’t income or education levels but attitudes toward the death penalty, which are a proxy for authoritarian attitudes more generally.
.. “Wealthy people who back capital punishment back Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty support Remain.”
.. “The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows.”
.. the Remain vote was consistently stronger in prosperous areas. Economics matters.
.. he pledged to hold a referendum at some point before 2017. At the time, this was an easy promise to make: Cameron believed he couldn’t deliver on it.
.. Rather than accentuating the positive, Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sought to scare the electorate into voting their way, arguing that a vote for Leave would plunge the U.K. economy into a recession and cost the average household about sixty-two hundred dollars a year.
.. Almost all economists agree that the E.U. has been good to Britain. But the sixty-two-hundred-a-year figure was so large, and so specific, that many people didn’t believe it.
.. the negative campaign, which was dubbed Project Fear, had backfired.
.. Rather than winning people over, it alienated many voters who had legitimate concerns about the E.U. “People have expressed real anger at being ignored by the system, and I think this is at the heart” of what happened, Hilton said.
.. the fate of the Remain campaign should serve as a reminder of the limits of negative campaigning—a reminder that Hillary Clinton would do well to take note of as she goes up against Donald Trump. In confronting populist demagoguery, it isn’t enough to attack its promulgators. To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind.
.. It claimed that liberating Britain from the shackles of the E.U. would enable it to reclaim its former glory. The Remain side argued, in effect, that while the E.U. isn’t great, Britain would be even worse off without it. That turned out to be a losing story.