Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,”

Precisely when we should be shouldering the historic task of investing this rich, safe, and healthy existence with meaning, we’ve buried utopia instead.

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 born?24

Utopias offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions.

Radical ideas about a different world have become almost literally unthinkable. The expectations of what we as a society can achieve have been dramatically eroded, leaving us with the cold, hard truth that without utopia, all that remains is a technocracy. Politics has been watered down to problem management. Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point

or two on the income tax rate.25

We see it in journalism, which portrays politics as a game in which the stakes are not ideals, but careers. We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. 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 o...

Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.26

the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms.

All the while, the market and commercial interests are enjoying free rein. The food industry supplies us with cheap garbage loaded with salt, sugar, and fat, putting us on the fast track to the doctor and dietitian. Advancing technologies are laying waste to ever more jobs, sending us back again to the job coach. And the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.28 Then we can go cry on our therapist’s shoulder. That’s the dystopia we are living in today.

It is not – I can’t emphasize this enough – that we don’t have it good. Far from it. If anything, kids today are struggling under the burden of too much pampering.

that we have all become a lot more fearful over the last decades.

In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do,32 when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.33 Lest there be any misunderstanding: It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it. Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first

century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting our quality of life. And while young people in the West have largely come of age in an era of apolitical technocracy, we will have to return to politics again to find a new utopia.

“value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”34 We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad-news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.

It’s time to return to utopian thinking.

Without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost. Not that the present is bad; on the contrary. However, it is bleak, if we have no hope of anything better.

Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”6

Poor people can’t handle money. This seems to be the prevailing sentiment, almost a truism. After all, if they knew how to manage money, how could they be poor in the first place? We assume that they must spend it on fast food and soda instead of on fresh fruit and books. So to “help,” we’ve rigged up a myriad of ingenious assistance programs, with reams of paperwork, registration systems, and an army of inspectors, all revolving around the biblical principle that “those unwilling to work will not get to eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

the real experts on what poor people need are the poor people themselves.

“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”14

free money for everyone. Not as a favor, but as a right.

(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? The answers were no, no, and yes.

The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to the renowned economist Albert Hirschman, 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). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace.

arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.

After all, everyone stands to benefit.53

One of the perks of a basic income is that it would free the poor from the welfare trap and spur them to seek a paid job with true opportunities for growth and advancement. Since basic income is unconditional, and will not be taken away or reduced in the event of gainful employment, their circumstances can only improve.

The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame.

“The political right is afraid people will stop working,” laments Professor Forget in Canada, “and the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices.”56

Never before has the time been so ripe for the introduction of a universal, unconditional basic income.

See it as a dividend on progress, made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of past generations. In the end, only a fraction of our prosperity is due to our own exertions. We, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, are rich thanks to the institutions, the knowledge, and the social capital amassed for us by our forebears. This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.

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.

why do the poor make so many dumb decisions?

The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthfully. Offer money-management training and the poor are the last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “...

Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out the window. “Scarcity consumes you,” Shafir explains. “You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.”

Up to a per capita GDP of roughly $5,000 a year, life expectancy increases more or less automatically.18 But once there’s enough food on the table, a roof that doesn’t leak, and clean running water to drink, economic growth is no longer a guarantor of welfare. From that point on, equality is a much more accurate predictor.

Whether you look at the incidence of depression, burnout, drug abuse, high dropout rates, obesity, unhappy childhoods, low election turnout, or social and political distrust, the evidence points to the same culprit every time: inequality.20

Being poor in a rich country is a whole different story to being poor a couple centuries ago, when almost everybody, everywhere was a pauper.

When inequality goes up, social mobility goes down.

“it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.”

Had the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, gone this route, there’s little doubt other countries would have followed suit.

It’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever be able to shake off the dogma that if you want money, you have to work for it.

If there’s one thing that we capitalists have in common with the communists of old, it’s a pathological obsession with gainful employment.

the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.

The gross national product … measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile.

That is precisely what modern society’s sacred measure of progress, the Gross Domestic Product, does not measure.

And that’s to say nothing of all the unpaid labor that doesn’t even qualify as part of the black market, from volunteering to childcare to cooking, which together represents more than half of all our work.