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As far as I can tell, no one has tried to work out if being in or out will make us happier. This isn’t terribly surprising: if you think you know the answers to the questions surround sovereignty, the economy and immigration, you probably think you know the answer to the happiness question. However, happiness can be rather surprising and our intuitions surrounding it pretty bad. I started writing this because I didn’t know which option was better and wanted to clarify by thoughts by working through the impact on happiness. By the time I’d finished, I came to the conclusion, as Bill Clinton might have said “it’s the uncertainty, stupid”. In the long run I don’t think it makes that much difference to happiness one way or the other, but I do think they’ll be years of happiness-reducing worry if we vote to leave. I’m not going to try very hard to footnote this so, if that’s what you wanted, too bad.

The first thing to say is, quoting Daniel Kahneman, “nothing matters as much as you think it does when you’re thinking about”. My initial reaction the EU debate is that these things all seem like matters of life or death now but will actually have a surprisingly small difference on our lives either way. To make the point: sovereignty seems important, right? Who doesn’t want to be in control? But how much of your day have you spent feel genuinely aggrieved that the size and shape of tomatoes is decided in Brussels rather then Westminster. Probably not at long as it took you to eat the tomatoes you had in your sandwich at lunch, AMIRIGHT? I’ll look at each of sovereignty, the economy and immigration one-by-one (just like the animals who never went onto Noah’s Ark).

Sovereignty

To be precise, there’s two levels at which sovereignty matters for happiness. First, it feels good to be in control, regardless of what you choose. Second, if you’re in control, you can choose things that make you happier. At first glance the first level favours Brexit, but I’m not so sure at a second glance. If we left the EU there’d be a temporary illusion of control, but then we’d likely find ourselves in the position of the Swiss and Norwegians who pay 50-90% of what we do (source: The Economist) but can’t impact the EU regulations they have to abide by. Potentially Brexit would be even more frustrating: if you value autonomy, it might be worse to have to agree to things without even having had the chance to have your say.

As to the second level – the substantively different policy decisions that would get made in a Brexited rather than a Bremained world – that’s not clear either. Do you think our national policies would actually be that different? How much does Brussels stop us from enacting policies that would make us happier? For instance a UKIP Brexiteer might want the UK to leave the EU so we could lurch to the right, but if we did leave, it’s not clear if that would mean the UK itself would move further right (or if that would increase happiness). So for those in favour of Brexit or Bremain on policy grounds I’d want to know what differences you think would occur if we left.

The economy

I’m inclined to agree with the slew of economists who have agreed that being in the EU would make the UK richer faster (note: we’d still get richer outside the EU, just slightly slower). I’m not going to doubt that. What I’m going to doubt instead is how much happier we would be if we were richer. To cut a long story short, there’s pretty thin evidence that rising incomes, at least in the developed word, have increased happiness. Roughly speaking, it seems that it’s better to be richer than your neighbour, but if you and your neighbour get richer at the same rate, neither of you will feel any better or worse about this (I’m referring to the Easterlin Paradox, which is too complicated to be worth discussing at any greater length. Here’s the wikipedia page for it). It certainly seems like we would be happier if we were richer, but that’s because we suck as imagining what the future will be like when we get there: we’re focussing on the money which we forget we’ll get used to. If we didn’t get used to things you’d expect Mark Zuckerberg to be as happy, every day, as someone who’s just won the lottery, which is implausible (for more on this see hedonic adaptation and affective forecasting).

In other words I think the economic growth case is surprisingly uninteresting from a happiness perspective. In the long run, I’m sure Britain will be fine either way. We’ll eventually work out how we’re going to interact with Europe, ourselves and the rest of the world. It’ll be fine. Eventually. But as J M Keynes famously pointed out, in the long run, we’re all dead. So what I think is much more interesting is the uncertainty that surrounds Brexit. If we Bremain, we know what will happen: the status quo. If we Brexit, we have years of uncertainty ahead of us: what relationship will we form with the EU? What will happen to UK jobs that depends on trade? Will we adopt the Swiss model, the Norwegian model, or something else? Will we form trade deals with other parts of the world? And so on. I should note this doesn’t just apply to the economy, but to other things too. For instance, will Scotland want to leave the UK if we Brexit? Will Ireland? There’s uncertainty in lots of directions.

Uncertainty causes worry, and worry is quite straightforwardly bad for happiness (see this for more on the badness of uncertainty). Brexit will cause a lot of uncertainty that Bremain won’t, so I think it’s safe to that Bremain wins on this count. You might object it’s weird to be worried about things that ultimately don’t matter. I’d simply respond that this is true for almost everything we worry about already, but that doesn’t stop us worrying.

Immigration

Lastly, immigration. This one is quite a lot harder to think about. Again, there’s two levels at which it matters: first, how much (un)happiness does the thought of immigration cause you? Second, how much (un)happiness does it cause you regardless of what you think? That might seem unclear, so imagine this case: someone fears immigrants will take their job, but this doesn’t actually happen. So immigration is bad for this person only on the first level and not on the second. Again, I think immigration is something that people worry about when they think about it, but they don’t think about it very much. I mean, people have lives to live, right? You go to work, you go shopping, you get stuck in traffic, you think about how awesome Game of Thrones is, etc. After that, there’s not much mental space left to worry about immigration. Is there anyone alive who spends more than 5 minutes a day furiously seething with hatred for immigrants? If there is, I pity them.

The second level is not a question I feel qualified to comment on. I confess I’m pro-cosmopolitan, so I like meeting people from different nations, eating their food and making fun of them for all the battles we’ve beaten them in. I recognise other people feel differently, so I’ll leave this here. As to the economic question – do immigrants nick jobs and put strain on resources? – I’ll leave to the economists, but I gather than answer is ‘no’. Rather people who have jobs and then spend their money on stuff seem to be part of the economy, not detracting from it (see the lump of labour fallacy).

My analysis hasn’t considered what potential immigrants want. This might seem strange (“it’s our country. Britain first! Whose round is it anyway? Lads, lads, lads”) but I’m not interested solely in the happiness of British natives, so much as the happiness of people. My thought here is that if someone wants to leave their country, their friends and family and support networks, to move to a new place with strange people and start again, it seems reasonable to think they’d be happier if they were here. I have a number of American friends who got deported when their visas ran out and I always thought that was rather cruel: not only were they integrated in British life, but they wanted to be here.

In conclusion

I’ll admit the happiness analysis on this isn’t very straightforward. I think much of what we think matters doesn’t, and much of what we don’t think matters does. This might sound strange, but I don’t think, once the dust eventually settles, it’ll make that much difference one way or the other. If you, dear reader, can think of an area where it will really matter, please let me know what I’ve missed. What does seem important is the years of nagging uncertainty a post-Brexit world brings. On that basis, Bremaining seems like the better choice in terms of happiness.