Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

Utopias are a breeding ground for discord, violence, even genocide. Utopias ultimately become dystopias; in fact, a utopia is a dystopia.

In fact, the twenty-first-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, as do our hospitals, schools, and TV networks. What counts is achieving targets. Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well.

Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”

(1) Would people work significantly less if they receive a guaranteed income? (2) Would the program be too expensive? (3) Would it prove politically unfeasible?

utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia).

“If you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with your mind elsewhere,” they write. “Self-control feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day.” This is how scarcity – whether of time or of money – leads to unwise decisions.

It was during the 1970s that statisticians decided it would be a good idea to measure banks’ “productivity” in terms of their risk-taking behavior. The more risk, the bigger their slice of the GDP.14 Hardly any wonder, then, that banks have continually upped their lending, egged on by politicians who have been convinced that the financial sector’s slice is every bit as valuable as the whole manufacturing industry.

Two candidates are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which also incorporate pollution, crime, inequality, and volunteer work in their equations.

“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”31 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity – the teachers, the police officers, the nurses – are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

If we want this century to be one in which all of us get richer, then we’ll need to free ourselves of the dogma that all work is meaningful. And, while we’re at it, let’s also get rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value.

The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.

There is a stubborn misconception that the job market is like a game of musical chairs. It’s not. Productive women, seniors, or immigrants won’t displace men, young adults, or hardworking citizens from their jobs. In fact, they create more employment opportunities. A bigger workforce means more consumption, more demand, more jobs.

Opening our borders is not something we can do overnight, of course – nor should it be. Unchecked migration would certainly corrode social cohesion in the Land of Plenty. But we do need to remember one thing: In a world of insane inequality, migration is the most powerful tool for fighting poverty.

Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody.2 After all, an education gives you tools to defend your opinions. Intelligent people are highly practiced in finding arguments, experts, and studies that underpin their preexisting beliefs, and the Internet has made it easier than ever to be consumers of our own opinions, with another piece of evidence always just a mouse-click away.

discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible.

Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously? Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable. This window of acceptability is populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into the law books.