Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all? And why is more than 60% of your income dependent on the country where you just happen to have been

Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone London, May 2009 – An experiment is under way. Its subjects: thirteen homeless men. They are veterans of the street. Some have been sleeping on the cold pavement of the Square Mile, Europe’s financial center, for going on forty years. Between the police expenses, court costs, and social services, these thirteen troublemakers have racked up a bill estimated at £400,000 ($650,000) or more.1 Per year. The strain on city services and local charities is too great for things to go on this way. So Broadway, a London-based aid organization, makes a radical decision: From now on, the city’s thirteen consummate drifters will be getting VIP treatment. It’s adiós to the daily helpings of food stamps, soup kitchens, and shelters. They’re getting a drastic and instantaneous bailout. From now on, these rough sleepers will receive free money. To be exact, they’re getting £3,000 in spending money, and they don’t have to do a thing in return.2 How they spend it is up to them. They can opt to make use of an advisor if they’d like – or not. There are no strings attached, no questions to trip them up.3 The only thing they’re asked is: What do you think you need? Gardening Classes “I didn’t have enormous expectations,” one social worker later recalled.4 But the drifters’ desires proved eminently modest. A telephone, a dictionary, a hearing aid – each had his own ideas about what he needed. In fact, most were downright thrifty. After one year, they had s...

So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983)

a Duke University professor by the name of Jane Costello had been researching the mental health of youngsters south of the Great Smoky Mountains since 1993. Every year, the 1,420 kids enrolled in her study took a psychiatric test. The cumulative results had already shown that those growing up in poverty were much more prone to behavioral problems than other children. This wasn’t exactly news, though. Correlations between poverty and mental illness had been drawn before by another academic, Edward Jarvis, in his famous paper “Report on Insanity,” published in 1855.

In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and

If you include unpaid labor, women in Europe and North America work more than men.19 “My grandma didn’t have the vote, my mom didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have any time,” as a Dutch comedienne pithily summed it

Or take the legal profession. It goes without saying that the rule of law is necessary for a country to prosper. But now that the U.S. has seventeen times the number of lawyers per capita as Japan, does that make American rule of law seventeen times as effective?5 Or Americans seventeen times as protected? Far from it. Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for patent infringement.

What has happened in recent decades is exactly the opposite. A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, twenty years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.

The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5 – and often much more – is pumped back into the

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the

The underdog socialist forgets that the real problem isn’t the national debt, but overextended households and businesses. He forgets that fighting poverty is an investment that pays off in spades. And he forgets that, all the while, the bankers and the lawyers are polishing turds at the expense of waste collectors and nurses.