Scotch Independence - the countdown

The thing about these Yes vs No economic arguments is that people keep fighting over the small details (such as 250 ****s losing their jobs). An economy of 5.5 million people, all going about their own individual business, is extremely complex - and you will get lost in the numbers if you try to break down every small economic transaction and tally them up on the Yes or the No side.

When the likes of physicists try to break down extremely complex processes, such as the movement of particles in the process of entropy - they don't try to track the individual particles and work out how many times they are going to bang off each other - they work how the particles behave on average - so if you pour hot water into a bucket of cold water it will take a certain amount of seconds on average for the whole bucket to become a consistent temperature - when you repeat the experiment several times you get several different results, but on average they are there or there abouts. The process is just too complex to give a definite millisecond answer because people can't possibly model the billions of particles interacting with each other.

It's the same with any really complex system of moving parts (and is why economists are notoriously bad at predicting ****) - when I've built programs to model silly things, like the number of throw-ins in a football game, I based it on historical data of 100,000 football matches - which says there's roughly 52 throw-ins a game. Of course some games have 80 throw-ins and some games have 20 throw-ins. I make money as a bookie by guessing correctly on average, rather than guessing the exact right answer in every game. The key is to always try to go for the result that you think will be correct on average, rather than spending all your worrying about Arsenal's new left winger (or in this case 250 jobs).

So aye, people picking up every single economic argument and then spending hours arguing about the individual details is a pretty painful way to do it - if I was going to judge the differences in an economic system I wouldn't demand to know every single variable (such as ER constantly demanding answers to every single stupid unknown) - I'd try to look at the average results of similar systems elsewhere, for instance what the average standard of living is in Scotland vs other similar size countries with similar size work forces and similar demographics, etc.

A quick Google around similar sized European nations tells you that Scotland is under performing for GDP output anyway (which is even more bizarre given the presence of oil) - so you can introduce all the individual economic red herrings you want, but on average you're not doing very well vs similar countries - why would you want to keep it that way, why can't you achieve the average?