How a Quest by Elites Is Driving ‘Brexit’ and Trump

What lesson should a card-carrying member of the economic elite take from the success of Donald J. Trump, and British voters’ decision to leave the European Union?

Voters in large numbers have been rejecting much of the underlying logic behind a dynamic globalized economy that on paper seems to make the world much richer. For the bankers, trade negotiators, international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it), this is cause for introspection, at least among those who aren’t too narcissistic to care what their countrymen think.

Here is an overarching theory of what we might have missed in the march toward a hyper-efficient global economy: Economic efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Efficiency sounds great in theory. What kind of monster doesn’t want to optimize possibilities, minimize waste and make the most of finite resources? But the economic and policy elite may like efficiency a lot more than normal humans do.

Maybe the people who run the world, in other words, have spent decades pursuing goals that don’t scratch the itches of large swaths of humanity. Perhaps the pursuit of ever higher gross domestic product misses a fundamental understanding of what makes most people tick. Against that backdrop, support for Mr. Trump and for the British withdrawal known as Brexit are just imperfect vehicles through which someone can yell, “Stop.”

In a poll of 639 British economists conducted in May, 88 percent expected that a vote to leave the European Union would depress British economic growth, yet 52 percent of voters approved it anyway. Only two of 40 leading economists, surveyed by the University of Chicago Initiative on Global Markets, agreed with the statement that a country can improve citizens’ well-being by increasing its trade surplus or cutting its trade deficit, an idea that is a hallmark of populist rhetoric.