Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

the fact that something is difficult does not automatically make it valuable.

“On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”14

As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work (even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow.

In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission.16 Another recent poll revealed that as many as 37% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.17

From telemarketers to tax consultants, there’s a rock-solid rationale for creating one bullshit job after another: You can net a fortune without ever producing a thing.

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,”

If the post-war era gave us fabulous inventions like the washing machine, the refrigerator, the space shuttle, and the pill, lately it’s been slightly improved iterations of the same phone we bought a couple years ago.

In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.

Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.”

In plain English: Higher taxes would get more people to do work that’s useful.

If there were ever a place where the quest for a better world ought to start, it’s in the classroom.

If you were to draw up a list of the most influential professions, teacher would likely rank among the highest. This isn’t because teachers accrue rewards like money, power, or status, but because teaching shapes something much bigger – the course of human history.

If there’s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it’s in the classroom.

The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market – the market of 2030?

Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipating and adapting, we’d be focusing on steering and creating. Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living.

The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.

In the end, it’s not the market or technology that decides what has real value, but society. 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. Then we might realize that in terms of value creation, it just doesn’t pay to be a banker.

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play.

Robots. They have become one of the strongest arguments in favor of a shorter workweek and a universal basic income.

Moore’s Law,

We may be living in the age of individualism, but our societies have never been more dependent on one another.

In the age of the chip, the box, and Internet retail, being just fractionally better than the rest means you’ve not only won the battle, you’ve won the war. Economists call this phenomenon the “winner-take-all society.”

In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome – an economy founded on slave labor.

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.

“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 equipment.”16

Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of all those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines.17 And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next twenty. “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame,” a New York University professor notes. “But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.”18

“Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs.”21

Today, new jobs are concentrated mostly at the bottom of the pyramid – at supermarkets, fast-food chains, and nursing homes. Those are the jobs that are still safe. For the moment.

Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson,” Jennings observed, “but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

Welcome, my friends, to the Second Machine Age, as this brave new world of chips and algorithms is already being called. The

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 computers will be just as intelligent as people. In 2045 they might even be a billion times smarter than all human brains put together.

According to the techno-prophets, there simply is no limit to the exponential growth of machine computing power. Of course, Kurzweil is equal parts genius and mad. And it’s worth bearing in mind that computing power is not the same thing as intelligence.

Robots don’t get sick, don’t take time off, and never complain, but if they wind up forcing masses of people into poorly paid, dead-end jobs, well that’s just asking for trouble.

The British economist Guy Standing has predicted the emergence of a new, dangerous “precariat” – a surging social class of people in low-wage, temporary jobs and with no political voice.

According to the radical freethinker Thomas Paine, “every machine for the abridgment of labor is a blessing to the great family of which we are part.”33

We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners. For 200 years that system was the labor market, which ceaselessly churned out new jobs and, in so doing, distributed the fruits of progress.

Preparing our own children for the new century will be considerably more difficult, however, not to mention expensive. All the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.

Anyone who wants to continue plucking the fruits of progress will have to come up with a more radical solution. Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.

For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. In the 1950s we couldn’t conceive that the advent of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and, above all, washing machines would help prompt women to enter the workplace in record numbers, and yet they did.

Nevertheless, it is not technology itself that determines the course of history. In the end, it is we humans who decide how we want to shape our destiny. The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there’s only one choice left, and that’s redistribution. Massive redistribution.

Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of la...

All the standard options – more schooling, regulation, austerity – will be a drop in the bucket. In the end, the only solution is a worldwide, progressive tax on wealth, says Professor Piketty, though he acknowledges this is merely a “useful utopia.”

And then there’s that nagging sense of guilt. Here we are in the Land of Plenty, philosophizing about decadent utopias with free cash and fifteen-hour workweeks, while hundreds of millions of people still have to survive on a dollar a day. Shouldn’t we instead be tackling the single biggest challenge of our times: to afford every person on Earth the joys of the Land of Plenty?

This is nothing less than a whole new approach to economics. The randomistas don’t think in terms of models. They don’t believe humans are rational actors. Instead, they assume we are quixotic creatures, sometimes foolish and sometimes astute, and by turns afraid, altruistic, and self-centered. And this approach appears to yield considerably better results.

I’m talking about open borders.

Not just for bananas, derivatives, and iPhones, but for one and all – for knowledge workers, for refugees, and for ordinary people in search of greener pastures.

Four different studies have shown that, depending on the level of movement in the global labor market, the estimated growth in “gross worldwide product” would be in the range of 67% to 147%.17 Effectively, open borders would make the whole world twice as rich.

Oddly though, the world is wide open for everything but people. Goods, services, and stocks crisscross the globe. Information circulates freely, Wikipedia is available in 300 languages and counting, and the NSA can easily check which games John in Texas is playing on his smartphone.

Economic growth isn’t a cure-all, of course, but out beyond the gates of the Land of Plenty, it’s still the main driver of progress. In the hinterlands there are still countless mouths to feed, children to educate, and homes to build.

Ethics, too, favors open borders. Say John from Texas is dying of hunger. He asks me for food, but I refuse. If John dies, is it my fault? Arguably, I merely allowed him to die, which while not exactly benevolent, isn’t exactly murder either.