Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.

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.

average child living in early 1990s North America was more anxious than psychiatric patients in the early 1950s.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.

“It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

(1) households put the money to good use, (2) poverty declines, (3) there can be diverse long-term benefits for income, health, and tax revenues, and (4) the programs cost less than the alternatives.16 So why send over expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor?

The pension system and employment protection rules are still keyed to those fortunate enough to have a steady job, public assistance is rooted in the misconception that we can rely on the economy to generate enough jobs, and welfare benefits are often not a trampoline, but a trap.

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.

Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s too little time, money, friendship, food – it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality.”

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.

At the time when they were comparatively poor, they scored substantially worse on the cognitive tests, not because they had become dumber people somehow – they were still the same Indian sugarcane farmers, after all – but purely and simply because their mental bandwidth was compromised.

Professor Duncan concluded that combating poverty “pays for itself by the time the poor children have reached middle age.”

welfare mother with two kids has her benefits cut because she hasn’t sufficiently developed her job skills. The government saves a couple thousand bucks, but the hidden costs of children who will consequently grow up poor, eat poor food, get poor grades at school, and be more likely to have a run-in with the law, are many times greater.

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.

“the worst families in America are those that actually function as families – that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture.”

We live in a world where the going rule seems to be that the more vital your occupation (cleaning, nursing, teaching), the lower you rate in the GDP.

“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease.

Whereas public sector services often bring a plethora of hidden benefits, the private sector is riddled with hidden costs.

“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.

There are strong indications that in a modern knowledge economy, even forty hours a week is too much. Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without.

Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

Call it the paradox of progress: Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.

Is it any coincidence that the proliferation of well-paid bullshit jobs has coincided with a huge boom in higher education and an economy that revolves around knowledge?

Almost anybody can collect trash, but a career in banking is reserved for a select few.

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. Imagine that all this talent were to be invested not in shifting wealth around, but in creating it. Who knows, we might already have had jetpacks, built submarine cities, or cured cancer.

Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; forty years later, it’s a mere five days.

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 economy.

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.

Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation – as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life.

The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving.

If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential twenty-first-century skill. Not because the law or the market or technology demand it, but solely because that, apparently, is how we prefer to earn our money.

“On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”

“Making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future,” writes the American economist Tyler Cowen.

People with a college education are moving to live closer to other people with a college education. In the 1970s, the most learned American city (in terms of the percentage of residents with four-year degrees) was 16 percentage points more educated than the least educated city. Today, this difference has doubled.

“People do not get used to handouts,” Duflo succinctly points out. “They get used to nets.”

there is no hard evidence that microcredit is effective at combating poverty and illness.

deworming children with intestinal complaints has been shown to yield 2.9 years of additional schooling

In this era of “globalization,” only 3% of the world’s population lives outside their country of birth.

Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders.

In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people.

Take a Somalian toddler. She has a 20% probability of dying before reaching the age of five. Now compare: American frontline soldiers had a mortality rate of 6.7% in the Civil War, 1.8% in World War II, and 0.5% in the Vietnam War.30 Yet we won’t hesitate to send that Somalian toddler back if it turns out her mother isn’t a “real” refugee. Back to the Somalian child-mortality front.

Still, we mostly reserve our outrage for the injustices that happen inside our own national borders. We’re indignant that men get paid more than women for doing the same work, and that white Americans earn more than black Americans. But even the 150% racial income gap of the 1930s pales in comparison to the injustices inflicted by our borders. A Mexican citizen living and working in the U.S. earns more than twice as much as a compatriot still living in Mexico. An American earns nearly three times as much for the same work as a Bolivian, even when they are of the same skill level, age, and sex. With a comparable Nigerian, the difference is a factor of 8.5 – and that’s adjusted for purchasing power in the two countries.

Subsequent study after study has clinched these findings. In fact, if you adjust for sex, age, and income, ethnicity and criminality prove to be unconnected.

Three-quarters of all border walls and fences were erected after the year 2000.

single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.