Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

Where 84% of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10%.1 If this trend holds, the extreme poverty that has been an abiding feature of life will soon be eradicated for good. Even those we still call poor will enjoy an abundance unprecedented in world history. In the country where I live, the Netherlands, a homeless person receiving public assistance today has more to spend than the average Dutch person in 1950, and four times more than people in Holland’s glorious Golden Age, when the country still ruled the seven seas.

The past two centuries have seen explosive growth in both population and prosperity worldwide. Per capita income is now ten times what it was in 1850. The average Italian is fifteen times as wealthy as in 1880. And the global economy? It is now 250 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution – when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.

“To the medieval mind,” the Dutch historian Herman Pleij writes, “modern-day western Europe comes pretty close to a bona fide Cockaigne. You have fast food available 24/7, climate control, free love, workless income, and plastic surgery to prolong youth.”4 These days, there are more people suffering from obesity worldwide than from hunger.5 In Western Europe, the murder rate is forty times lower, on average, than in the Middle Ages,

Welcome, in other words, to the Land of Plenty. To the good life, where almost everyone is rich, safe, and healthy. Where there’s only one thing we lack: a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Because, after all, you can’t really improve on paradise. Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”18

According to Oscar Wilde, upon reaching the Land of Plenty, we should once more fix our gaze on the farthest horizon and rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realization of Utopias,” he wrote. But the far horizon remains blank. The Land of Plenty is shrouded in fog. Precisely when we should be shouldering the historic task of investing this rich, safe, and healthy existence with meaning, we’ve buried utopia instead.

Instead of abstract ideals, blueprints consist of immutable rules that tolerate no dissension. The Italian poet Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) offers a good example. In his utopia, or rather dystopia,

There is, however, another avenue of utopian thought, one that is all but forgotten. If the blueprint is a high-resolution photo, then this utopia is just a vague outline. It offers not solutions but guideposts. Instead of forcing us into a straitjacket, it inspires us to change. And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of the good. As one American philosopher has remarked, “any serious utopian thinker will be made uncomfortable by the very idea of the blueprint.”23 It was in this spirit that the British philosopher Thomas More literally wrote the book on utopia (and coined the term). Rather than a blueprint to be ruthlessly applied, his utopia was, more than anything, an indictment of a grasping aristocracy that demanded ever more luxury as common people lived in extreme poverty.

And driving it all is a force sometimes called “liberalism,” an ideology that has been all but hollowed out. What’s important now is to “just be yourself” and “do your thing.” Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom. Our fear of moralizing in any form has made morality a taboo in the public debate. The public arena should be “neutral,” after all – yet never before has it been so paternalistic. On every street corner we’re baited to booze, binge, borrow, buy, toil, stress, and swindle.

If a political party or a religious sect had even a fraction of the influence that the advertising industry has on us and our children, we’d be up in arms. But because it’s the market, we remain “neutral.”27

The market is npt a monolyth, an ideology like christianity or ecologism. It's A competition ground.

If you’re not following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen, the powers that be are happy to whip you into shape. Their tools of choice? Control, surveillance, and repression.

Examples?

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.

The word utopia means both “good place” and “no place.” What we need are alternative horizons that spark the imagination. And I do mean horizons in the plural; conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.

research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality.13 “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.”

The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need.

free money for everyone. Not as a favor, but as a right. Call it the “capitalist road to communism.”26 A monthly allowance, enough to live on, without having to lift a finger. The only condition, as such, is that you “have a pulse.”

“[The] declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home,” noted the Seattle experiment’s concluding report. For example, one mother who had dropped out of high school worked less in order to earn a degree in psychology and get a job as a researcher. Another woman took acting classes; her husband began composing music. “We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists,” she told the researchers.

To be self-sufficient you shouldn't receive tax money...

We can get rid of the whole bureaucratic rigmarole designed to force assistance recipients into low-productivity jobs at any cost, and we can help finance the new simplified system by chucking the maze of tax credits and deductions, too. Any further necessary funds can be raised by taxing assets, waste, raw materials, and consumption.

It’s an ingrained reflex among those on the left to make every plan, every credit, and every benefit income dependent. The problem is, that tendency is counter-productive.

people are more open to solidarity if it benefits them personally. The more we, our family, and our friends stand to gain through the welfare state, the more we’re willing to contribute.

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. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “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.”

The growing rift between those with and those without a college degree makes it essential to give the have-nots a leg-up.

Degrees are themselves traps sometimes. Student loans for humanity degrees is a disaster

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. Yet it’s precisely because we’re richer than ever that it is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress:

Of course, this is not to say we should implement this dream without forethought. That could be disastrous. Utopias always start out small, with experiments that ever so slowly change the world.

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.” Compare it to a new computer that’s running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors, and eventually it freezes – not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has to do too much at once. Poor people have an analogous problem. They’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

scarcity – whether of time or of money – leads to unwise decisions.

Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees – you name it. “Fighting scarcity could even reduce costs,” projects Shafir.

the things you want are determined to a large extent by what people around you have. As Shafir says, “The growing inequality in the Western world is a major obstacle in this respect.” If lots of people are buying the latest smartphone, then you want one, too. As long as inequality continues to rise, the gross domestic mental bandwidth will continue to contract.

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.

it’s all about relative poverty. However wealthy a country gets, inequality always rains on the parade. Being poor in a rich country is a whole different story to

inequality is not the only source of hardship. It’s one structural factor that feeds into the evolution of lots of social problems and is intricately linked to a constellation of other factors. And, in point of fact, society can’t function without some degree of inequality. There still need to be incentives to work, to endeavor, and to excel, and money is a very effective stimulus. Nobody would want to live in a society where cobblers earn as much as doctors. Or rather, nobody living in such a place would want to risk getting sick.

“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,” said the British essayist Samuel Johnson in 1782.28 Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood that poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.

According to the pious Malthus, sexual abstinence was the only thing that could prevent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from descending to spread war, famine, disease, and death. Indeed, Malthus was convinced that England was teetering on the brink of a disaster as terrible as the Black Death (the plague) that wiped out half its population in 1349–53.

Orwell recalls spending entire days simply lying in bed because there was nothing worth getting up for. The crux of poverty, he says, is that “it annihilates the future.” All that remains is surviving in the here and now. He also marvels at “how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

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

Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems. “By the standard of the GDP,” says the writer Jonathan Rowe, “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.”13

“If banking had been subtracted from the GDP, rather than added to it,” the Financial Times recently reported, “it is plausible to speculate that the financial crisis would never have happened.”

“We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”

Nevertheless, in the Land of Plenty we have come to the end of a long and historic voyage. For more than thirty years now, growth has hardly made us better off, and in some cases quite the reverse. If we want a higher quality of life, we will have to take the first step in search of other means, and alternative metrics.

Maybe economic stagnation is the product of welfare?

The first person to argue that what matters is not the nature but the price of products was the economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924). By Marshall’s measure, a Paris Hilton movie, an hour of Jersey Shore, and a Bud Light Lime can all boost a country’s wealth, as long as they carry a price tag.

Congress wasn’t reassured, however. In 1932, it appointed a brilliant young Russian professor by the name of Simon Kuznets to answer a simple question: How much stuff can we make? Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP.

a new, scientific brand of economics revolving around models, equations, and numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. This was a completely different form of economics to what John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek had learned at school. When people around 1900 talked about “the economy,” they usually just meant “society.” But the 1950s introduced a new generation of technocrats who invented a whole new objective: getting the “economy” to “grow.”

During wartime, it’s perfectly reasonable to borrow from the future. During wartime, it makes sense to pollute the environment and go into debt. It can even be preferable to neglect your family, put your children to work on a production line, sacrifice your free time, and forget everything that makes life worth living. Indeed, during wartime, there’s no metric quite as useful as the GDP.

it’s precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail. “The gross national product … measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile,” said Robert Kennedy.

So how about some other options? 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.

simple rankings consistently conceal more than they reveal. A high score on the UN’s Human Development Index or the OECD’s Better Life Index may be something we should applaud, but not if we don’t know what is being measured.

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. “We can afford to pay more for the services we need – chiefly

“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.

The GDP was contrived in a period of deep crisis and provided an answer to the great challenges of the 1930s. As we face our own crises of unemployment, depression, and climate change, we, too, will have to search for a new figure. What we need is a “dashboard” complete with an array of indicators to track the things that make life worthwhile – money and growth, obviously, but also community service, jobs, knowledge, social cohesion. And, of course, the scarcest good of all: time.