Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

The inventor of GDP cautioned against including in its calculation expenditure for the military, advertising, and the financial sector,33 but his advice fell on deaf ears. After World War II, Kuznets grew increasingly concerned about the monster he had created. “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth,” he wrote in 1962, “between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”

Whereas couples worked a combined total of five to six days a week in the 1950s, nowadays it’s closer to seven or eight. At the same time, parenting has become a much more time-intensive job. Research suggests that across national boundaries, parents are dedicating substantially more time to their children.21 In the U.S., working mothers actually spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s.

But that time dedicated to children may be for different reasons. See The Coddling of the American Mind.

Even where real incomes have stayed the same and inequality has exploded, the consumption craze has continued, but on credit.

Consuming less starts with working less – or, better yet, with consuming our prosperity in the form of leisure. Accidents? Overtime is deadly.41 Long workdays lead to more errors:

Research in Norway has shown that men who take paternity leave are then 50% more likely to share laundry duty with their wives.44 Canadian research shows that they’ll spend more time on domestic chores and childcare.45

“In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth,” one leading demographer has observed. “I believe that in this century, the great redistribution will be in terms of working hours.”

Reduction of work first has to be reinstated as a political ideal. Then, we can curb the workweek step by step, trading in money for time, investing more money in education, and developing a more flexible retirement system and good provisions for paternity leave and childcare. It all starts with reversing incentives. Currently, it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime than to hire two part-time.54 That’s because many labor costs, such as healthcare benefits, are paid per employee instead of per hour.

“The moral of New York’s latest step towards chaos,” Time magazine later reported, is “that it pays to strike.”2 Rich Without Lifting a Finger Perhaps, but not in every profession. Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow.3 Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency.

When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse.

It goes without saying that the rule of law is necessary for a country to prosper. But now that the U.S. has seventeen times the number of lawyers per capita as Japan, does that make American rule of law seventeen times as effective?5 Or Americans seventeen times as protected? Far from it. Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for patent infringement.

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity – the teachers, the police officers, the nurses – are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

Well noted

a system in which an increasing number of people can earn money without contributing anything of tangible value to society. Call it the paradox of progress: Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.

the strike would last a whole six months – twenty times as long as the New York City sanitation workers’ strike. But whereas across the pond a state of emergency had been declared after just six days, Ireland was still going strong after six months without bankers.

In no time, people forged a radically decentralized monetary system with the country’s 11,000 pubs as its key nodes and basic trust as its underlying mechanism. By the time the banks finally reopened in November, the Irish had printed an incredible £5 billion in homemade currency. Some checks had been issued by companies, others were scribbled on the backs of cigar boxes, or even on toilet paper. According to historians, the reason the Irish were able to manage so well without banks was all down to social cohesion.

Let’s get one thing straight, however. Making money without creating anything of value is anything but easy. It takes talent, ambition, and brains.

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

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.

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? Remember, making money without creating anything of value isn’t easy. For starters, you have to memorize some very important-sounding but meaningless jargon. (Crucial when attending strategic trans-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstorm the value add-on co-creation in the network society.)

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit.

What makes all this especially shocking is that it’s happening in a capitalist system, a system founded on capitalist values like efficiency and productivity. While politicians endlessly stress the need to downsize government, they remain largely silent as the number of bullshit jobs goes right on growing. This results in scenarios where, on the one hand, governments cut back on useful jobs in sectors like healthcare, education, and infrastructure – resulting in unemployment – while on the other investing millions in the unemployment industry of training and surveillance

The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the greater the demand for corporate attorneys, lobbyists, and high-frequency traders. Demand doesn’t exist in a vacuum, after all; it’s the product of a constant negotiation, determined by a country’s laws and institutions, and, of course, by the people who control the purse strings.

Doesn't the increase of politjcal power of the state generate more of that? How can the UBI solve that?

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.

Maybe a fat billfold triggers a similar false consciousness: the conviction that you’re producing something of great value because you earn so much.

We can take a step toward a different world, and we can start, as such steps so often do, with taxes. Even utopias need a tax clause. For example, we could start with a transactions tax to rein in the financial industry. Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; forty years later, it’s a mere five days.

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.”

Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market – the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question. In 2030, there will likely be a high demand for savvy accountants untroubled by a conscience. If current trends hold, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland will become even bigger tax havens, enabling multinationals to dodge taxes even more effectively, leaving developing countries with an even shorter end of the stick. 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.

Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030?

If we restructure education around our new ideals, the job market will happily tag along. Let’s imagine we were to incorporate more art, history, and philosophy into the school curriculum. You can bet there will be a lift in demand for artists, historians, and philosophers.

But what about STEM? How to make a better society without it? Isn't there a bias here?

Robots. They have become one of the strongest arguments in favor of a shorter workweek and a universal basic income. In fact, if current trends hold, there is really just one other alternative: structural unemployment and growing inequality.

There’s just one problem. Even people with a framed piece of paper on their wall have cause for concern.

But what's the practical value of that piece of paper?

The British economist Alfred Marshall already noted this dynamic back in the late nineteenth century: The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners. In his own day, Marshall observed a shrinking oligopoly on the production of grand pianos.

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.

I admit, we’ve heard it all before. Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place. After all, if you look at the year 1800, some 74% of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31%, and by 2000 to a mere 3%.19 Yet this hasn’t led to mass unemployment. And look at Keynes writing in the 1930s about the “new disease” of “technological unemployment” that would soon be making headlines; when he died in 1946, everything still was peachy.

But that was 1963. Over the course of the twentieth century, productivity growth and job growth ran more or less parallel. Man and machine marched along side by side. Now, as we step out into a new century, the robots have suddenly picked up the pace. It began around the year 2000, with what two MIT economists called “the great decoupling.” “It’s the great paradox of our era,” said one. “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.

“labor market polarization,” or the widening gap between “lousy jobs” and “lovely jobs.” Though the share of highly skilled and unskilled jobs has remained fairly stable, work for the average-skilled is on a decline.

a part of such a dangerous class, and of a movement that laid the foundations of capitalism. Meet the Luddites.

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 And so they are. The word “robot” actually comes from the Czech robota, meaning “toil.” Humans created robots to do precisely those things they’d rather not do themselves. “Machinery must work for us in coal mines,” Oscar Wilde enthused in 1890. Machines should “be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.” According to Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an uncomfortable truth: Slavery is a prerequisite for civilization. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”34 However, there’s something else that is equally vital to the future of our world, and that’s a mechanism for redistribution. We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age,

People with a college education are moving to live closer to other people with a college education.

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 labor), and, of course, of robots. As far back as the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when everybody would benefit from intelligent machines that were “the property of all.”38 Technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there’s no economic law that says everyone will benefit.

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.”

the first RCT of foreign development aid didn’t happen until 1998.

Kremer’s was a landmark experiment. Since then, a veritable randomization industry has grown up around development aid, led by the aptly nicknamed “randomistas.” These are researchers who have had enough of the intuition, gut feelings, and ideological bickering of ivory-tower scholars about the needs of people struggling in Africa and elsewhere. What the randomistas want is numbers – incontrovertible data to show which aid helps, and which doesn’t.

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.

few intuitions hold up against the evidence from RCTs. Traditional economists would say that the poor would get treated for worms of their own accord, given the obvious benefits – and innate human rationality. But that’s a fallacy.

The time has come to put paid to what Duflo calls the three I’s of development aid: Ideology, Ignorance, and Inertia. “I don’t have many opinions to start with,” she said in an interview a few years ago. “I have one opinion – one should evaluate things – which is strongly held. I’m never unhappy with the results. I haven’t yet seen a result I didn’t like.”15 Many a would-be do-gooder could learn from this attitude. Duflo is an example of how to combine big ideals with a thirst for knowledge, for how to be idealist without becoming ideological.

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.

But then if poverty is the culprit of crime, bringing masses of poor migrants that will lowermedium wealth will have obvious impacts on crime.

So, if diversity isn’t to blame for the lack of cohesion in modern-day society, what is? The answer is simple: poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. “It is not the diversity of a community that undermines trust,” conclude Abascal and Baldassarri, “but rather the disadvantages that people in diverse communities face.”

Correlation and causation? What if trust generates wealth? See WEIRD theory.

Hardworking immigrants boost productivity, which brings paycheck payoffs to everybody.

But if thry don't have to work (UBI) what's the gain?

In countries like Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom, they even bring in more tax revenue per household than the native population.50

Countries could also decide not to give immigrants the right to government assistance, or not until after a minimum number of years, or not until they’ve paid, say, $50,000 in taxes. And you could set up similar parameters if you’re concerned they form a political threat or won’t integrate. You can create language and culture tests. You can withhold the right to vote. And you can send them back if they don’t find a job. Unfair? Perhaps so. Yet isn’t the alternative of keeping people out altogether exponentially more unfair?

That's fine, but is that "open borders"?