by Jason Morgan
Mises.org
For months before the Brexit referendum on June 23rd, entire industries were hard at work attempting to predict how the UK electorate would vote.
Polling companies canvassed neighborhoods, made phone calls, sent surveys by e-mail, monitored websites, and spoke with people on busy city streets, in the process assembling a trove of data which the companies then analyzed and distilled down to probabilities for and against.
The Polls and Predictions Were Wrong
The media in virtually every country around the world built on this polling — and on the reams of op-eds by pundits with (and without) vast expertise in banking, finance, politics, and diplomacy — to forecast the referendum results. Handicapping the election became the responsibility of whole sections of newsrooms.