Leaving the EU will change the way Britain relates to the rest of the continent, and inevitably there will be winners and losers. There will probably be enough of each for anyone who fancies a spot of cherry picking to prove that leaving was a disaster or a blessing if they put their mind to it. But what about the might of beens? The things that would have happened if we had stayed but didn't because we left. This is something we'll never know about, but an interview with Taavet Hinrikus in the Guardian gives some clues.
The trouble is that business is not really the result of a given set of conditions giving rise to a set of predictable outcomes. It's much more like molecules floating around in a primordial soup waiting for exactly the right spark to hit exactly the right combination. This is what happened in Silicon Valley and what is to a degree now happening in London.
We have seen that when it comes to Brexit nobody knows anything. Predictions are worth very little. Predictions made on the basis of expert knowledge, in particular of economic theory, are often spectacularly wrong. But we are better are predicting social behaviour. A lot of us guessed that Boris Johnson wouldn't get to lead the Tories after the vote for example. Entrepreneurial activity is a bit more like this than it is to economics. So when someone like Taavet who has built a multi-million tech business from scratch speaks it is worth listening. "If the hard Brexit happens, I would assume that London wouldn’t be the centre of the tech world in Europe.”
As I say nobody knows anything and he might be wrong. But he might be right.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/03/transferwise-brexit-london-tech-centre-europe?CMP=share_btn_tw
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