Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures

by Rutger Bregman

As people and societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies. The modern creed – or worse, the belief that there’s nothing left to believe in – makes us blind to the shortsightedness and injustice that still surround us every day.

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 of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.

And thus, in the revolutionary year of 1968, when young demonstrators the world over were taking to the streets, five famous economists – John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Watts, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Lampman – wrote an open letter to Congress. “The country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty,” they said in an article published on the front page of the New York Times. According to the economists, the costs would be “substantial, but well within the nation’s economic and fiscal capacity.”38 The letter was signed by 1,200 fellow economists. And their appeal did not fall on deaf ears. The following August, President Nixon presented a bill providing for a modest basic income, calling it “the most significant piece of social legislation in our nation’s history.” According to Nixon, the baby boomers would do two things deemed impossible by earlier generations. Besides putting a man on the moon (which had happened the month before), their generation would also, finally, eradicate poverty.

Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, less than 1% of GDP.48 That’s roughly a quarter of U.S. military spending. Winning the war on poverty would be a bargain compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which a Harvard study estimated have cost us a staggering $4–$6 trillion.

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.

Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a fantastic engine for prosperity. “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto.

Ten years after the casino’s arrival, Costello’s findings showed that the younger the age at which children escaped poverty, the better their teenage mental health. Among her youngest age cohort, Costello observed a “dramatic decrease” in criminal conduct. In fact, the Cherokee children in her study were now better behaved than the control group.

On seeing the data, Costello’s first reaction was dis-belief. “The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,” she later said. “This one had quite large effects.”5 Professor Costello calculated that the extra $4,000 per annum resulted in an additional year of educational attainment by age twenty-one and reduced the chance of a criminal record at age sixteen by 22%.

But the most significant improvement was in how the money helped parents, well, to parent. Before the casino opened its doors, parents worked hard through the summer but were often jobless and stressed over the winter. The new income enabled Cherokee families to put money aside and to pay bills in advance. Parents who were lifted out of poverty now reported having more time for their children.

What, then, is the cause of mental-health problems among the poor? Nature or culture? Both, was Costello’s conclusion, because the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk.8 But there’s a more important takeaway from this study. Genes can’t be undone. Poverty can.

In fact, conservative criticism of the old nanny state hits the nail on the head. The current tangle of red tape keeps people trapped in poverty. It actually produces dependence. Whereas employees are expected to demonstrate their strengths, social services expects claimants to demonstrate their shortcomings; to prove over and over that an illness is sufficiently debilitating, that a depression is sufficiently bleak, and that chances of getting hired are sufficiently slim. Otherwise your benefits are cut. Forms, interviews, checks, appeals, assessments, consultations, and then still more forms – every application for assistance has its own debasing, money-guzzling protocol. “It tramples on privacy and self-respect in a way inconceivable to anyone outside the benefit system,” says one British social services worker. “It creates a noxious fog of suspicion.”37 This isn’t a war on poverty; it’s a war on the poor.

Capitalist or communist, it all boils down to a pointless distinction between two types of poor, and to a major misconception that we almost managed to dispel some forty years ago – the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.

The GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.

While we’re on the subject, only Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7 – about the size of China’s military budget.8

As one historian explains, “The first thing you do in 1950s and ’60s if you’re a new nation is you open a national airline, you create a national army, and you start measuring GDP.”23 But that last item became progressively trickier. When the United Nations published its first standard guideline for figuring GDP in 1953, it totaled just under fifty pages. The most recent edition, issued in 2008, comes in at 722. Though it’s a number bandied about freely in the media, there are few people who really understand how the GDP is determined. Even many professional economists have no clue.24

When the musical mastermind composed his 14th string quartet in G major (K. 387) in 1782, he needed four people to perform it. Now, 250 years later, it still requires exactly four.28 If you’re looking to up your violin’s production capacity, the most you can do is play a little faster. Put another way: Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency. While we can produce coffee machines ever faster and more cheaply, a violinist can’t pick up the pace without spoiling the tune.

“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.

David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”14 In Graeber’s analysis, innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless, jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. “Bullshit jobs,” Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.

A long time ago, Friedrich Engels described the “false consciousness” to which the working classes of his day – the “proletariat” – had fallen victim. According to Engels, the nineteenth-century factory worker didn’t rise up against the landed elite because his worldview was clouded by religion and nationalism. Maybe society is stuck in a comparable rut today, except this time at the very top of the pyramid. Maybe some of those people have had their vision clouded by all the zeros on their paychecks, the hefty bonuses, and the cushy retirement plans. Maybe a fat billfold triggers a similar false consciousness: the conviction that you’re producing something of great value because you earn so much.

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. That may sound dramatic, but take an ordinary elementary school teacher. Forty years at the head of a class of twenty-five children amounts to influencing the lives of 1,000 children. Moreover, that teacher is molding pupils at an age when they’re at their most malleable. They’re still just children, after all. He or she not only equips them for the future, but in the process also has a direct hand in shaping that future.

Whereas in 1964 each of the four largest American companies still had an average workforce of about 430,000 people, by 2011 they employed only a quarter that number, despite being worth twice as much.14 Or take the tragic fate of Kodak, inventor of the digital camera and a company that in the late 1980s had 145,000 people on its payroll. In 2012, it filed for bankruptcy, while Instagram – the free online mobile photo service staffed by 13 people at the time – was sold to Facebook for $1 billion.

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.

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.

In 1990 the techno-prophet Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would even be able to outplay a chess master by 1998. He was wrong, of course. It was in 1997 that Deep Blue defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov. The world’s fastest computer at that time was the ASCI Red, developed by the American military and offering a peak performance speed of one teraflop. It was the size of a tennis court and cost $55 million. Sixteen years later, in 2013, a new supercomputer came on the market that easily clocked two teraflops and at just a fraction of the price: the PlayStation 4.

Take malaria. Every year, hundreds of thousands of children die of this disease, which can be prevented by mosquito nets that we can produce, ship, distribute, and teach people to use for all of $10 apiece. In a 2007 paper titled “The $10 Solution,” Sachs wrote, “We should bring forth armies of Red Cross volunteers to distribute bed nets and to offer village-based training for tens of thousands of villages across Africa.” To Easterly, it was obvious where all this was heading. Sachs and his buddy Bono would organize a charity concert, rake in a couple million, and then drop thousands of mosquito nets over Africa. In no time, the local net retailers would all be out of business, while the surfeit of nets would soon be doing duty as fishing gear or wedding veils. A few years after Sachs the Redeemer’s campaign, when the gift nets had worn out, the number of children dying of malaria would be higher than ever.

(the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that the only purpose of economic forecasts is to give astrology a better image),

(2) They’re all criminals Not according to the data. As it happens, people making a new life in the U.S. commit fewer offenses and less frequently end up in prison than the native population. Even as the number of illegal immigrants tripled between 1990 and 2013 to over eleven million, the crime rate reversed dramatically.37 The same is true for the U.K.: a few years ago, researchers from the London School of Economics reported that the crime rate had fallen significantly in areas that had experienced mass immigration from Eastern Europe.38 So then what about the kids of immigrants? In the U.S. they, too, are less likely than those with established American roots to enter a life of crime. In Europe, it’s a different story. To take my native Netherlands as an example, the children of Moroccan immigrants more frequently run afoul of the law. The question, of course, is why? For a long time, research into this question was put off limits by the dictates of political correctness. But in 2004 the first extended study exploring the connection between ethnicity and youth crime got under way in Rotterdam. Ten years later, the results were in. The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities.39 Subseque...

The time has come to redefine our concept of “work.” When I call for a shorter workweek, I’m not pushing for long, lethargic weekends. I’m calling for us to spend more time on the things that truly matter to us. A few years ago, Australian writer Bronnie Ware published a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, about patients she had tended during her nursing career.2 And guess what? No one said he or she would have liked to pay closer attention to coworkers’ PowerPoint presentations or to have brainstormed a little more on disruptive co-creation in the network society. The biggest regret was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Number two: “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

And the best way to shut people up is to make them feel silly.