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September 12 - September 29, 2021
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Oscar wilde quote
Today, the old medieval dream of the utopia is running on empty.
Running on empty
By the year 2013, six billion of the globe’s seven billion inhabitants owned a cell phone. (By way of comparison, just 4.5 billion had a toilet.)9
Mobile phone to toilet comparison
According to the World Health Organization, depression has even become the biggest health problem among teens and will be the number-one cause of illness worldwide by 2030.31 It’s a vicious circle. Never before have so many young adults been seeing a psychiatrist. Never before have there been so many early career burnouts. And we’re popping antidepressants like never before. Time and again, we blame collective problems like unemployment, dissatisfaction, and depression on the individual. If success is a choice, then so is failure. Lost your job? You should have worked harder. Sick? You must
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Depression
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.33
Best minds
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Woody Allen (b. 1935)
Money and poverty
“Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19 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.
Poverty
Not until 1978 was the plan for a basic income shelved once and for all, however, following a fatal discovery upon publication of the final results of the Seattle experiment. One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health. A basic income, evidently, gave women too much independence. Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no
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Divorce rate - wrong calculation
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana (1863–1952)
It was like Townsend and Malthus all over again, but as one historian rightly notes, “Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.”
Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state.
“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.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand. In the 1980s, Apple employees sported T-shirts that read, “Working 90 hours a week and loving it!” Later, productivity experts calculated that if they had worked half the hours then the world might have enjoyed the groundbreaking Macintosh computer a year earlier.
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.36 It’s no coincidence that the world’s wealthy countries, those with a large creative class and highly educated populations, have also shaved the most time off their workweeks.
The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. William Gibson (b. 1948)
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones. John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)
Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking. Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015)
