Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

But in the last 200 years, all of that has changed. In just a fraction of the time that our species has clocked on this planet, billions of us are suddenly rich, well nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and occasionally even beautiful. 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.2 For centuries, time all but stood still. Obviously, there was plenty to fill the history books, but life wasn’t exactly getting better. If you were to put an Italian peasant from 1300 in a time machine and drop him in 1870s Tuscany he wouldn’t notice much of a difference. Historians estimate that the average annual income in Italy around the year 1300 was roughly $1,600. Some 600 years later – after Columbus, Galileo, Newton, the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the invention of gunpowder, printing, and the steam engine – it was … still $1,600.3 Six hundred years of civilization,...

Maybe that’s also our biggest problem: Today, the old medieval dream of the utopia is running on empty. Sure, we could manage a little more consumption, a little more security – but the adverse effects in the form of pollution, obesity, and Big Brother are looming ever larger. For the medieval dreamer, the Land of Plenty was a fantasy paradise – “An escape from earthly suffering,” in the words of Herman Pleij. But if we were to ask that Italian farmer back in 1300 to describe our modern world, his first thought would doubtless be of Cockaigne. In fact, we are living in an age of biblical prophecies come true. What would have seemed miraculous in the Middle Ages is now commonplace: the blind restored to sight, cripples who can walk, and the dead returned to life. Take the Argus II, a brain implant that restores a measure of sight to people with genetic eye conditions. Or the Rewalk, a set of robotic legs that enables paraplegics to walk again. Or the Rheobatrachus, a species of frog that became extinct in 1983 but, thanks to Australian scientists, has quite literally been brought back to life using old DNA. The Tasmanian tiger is next on this research team’s wish list, whose work is part of the larger “Lazarus Project” (named for the New Testament story of a death deferred).

Simple desires beget simple utopias. If you’re hungry, you dream of a lavish banquet. If you’re cold, you dream of a toasty fire. Faced with mounting infirmities, you dream of eternal youth. All of these desires are reflected in the old utopias, conceived when life was still nasty, brutish, and short. “The earth produced nothing fearful, no diseases,” fantasized the Greek poet Telecides in the fifth century B.C., and if anything was needed, it would simply appear. “Every creek bed flowed with wine … Fish would come into your house, grill themselves, and then lie down on your table.”

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.

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.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Woody Allen (b. 1935)

“This puts the choice in the hands of the poor,” says Michael Faye, founder of GiveDirectly, the organization behind Bernard’s windfall. “And the truth is, I don’t think I have a very good sense of what the poor need.”7 Faye doesn’t give people fish, or even teach them to fish. He gives them cash, in the conviction that the real experts on what poor people need are the poor people themselves. When I asked him why there are so few peppy videos or pictures on GiveDirectly’s website, Faye explained that he doesn’t want to play on emotions too much. “Our data are hard enough.”

In their book Just Give Money to the Poor (2010), scholars at the University of Manchester furnish countless examples of cases where cash handouts with few or no strings attached have worked. In Namibia, figures for malnutrition took a nosedive (from 42% to 10%), as did those for truancy (from 40% to virtually nothing) and crime (by 42%). In Malawi, school attendance among girls and women surged 40%, regardless of whether the cash came with or without conditions. Time and again, the ones to profit most are children. They suffer less hunger and disease, grow taller, perform better at school, and are less likely to be forced into child labor.15 From Brazil to India, from Mexico to South Africa, cash-transfer programs have become all the rage across the Global South. When the United Nations formulated its Millennium Development Goals in 2000, these programs weren’t even on the radar. Yet by 2010, they were already reaching more than 110 million families in forty-five countries. Back at the University of Manchester, the researchers summed up these programs’ benefits: (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? Especially when this also takes sticky civil service fingers out of the equation. Plus, free cash greases the w...

A world without poverty – it might be the oldest utopia around. But anybody who takes this dream seriously must inevitably face a few tough questions. Why are the poor more likely to commit crimes? Why are they more prone to obesity? Why do they use more alcohol and drugs? In short, why do the poor make so many dumb decisions?

Take the diagram below. The y-axis shows an index of social problems; on the x-axis are the countries’ per capita GDP. It turns out that there’s no correlation whatsoever between these two variables. What’s more, the world’s richest superpower (the U.S.) rates alongside a country with less than half the per capita GDP (Portugal) for the highest incidence of social problems.

But hold on. What should it matter if some people are filthy rich, when even those who are the hardest up today are better off than the kings of a few centuries ago? A lot. Because 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 being poor a couple centuries ago, when almost everybody, everywhere was a pauper.

Take bullying. Countries with big disparities in wealth also have more bullying behavior, because there are bigger status differences. Or, in Wilkinson’s terms, the “psychosocial consequences” are such that people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them. This undercuts the quality of relationships (manifested in a distrust of strangers and status anxiety, for example). The resulting stress, in turn, is a major determinant of illness and chronic health problems. Okay – but shouldn’t we be more concerned with equal opportunities than with equal wealth? The fact is they both matter, and these two forms of inequality are inextricable. Just look at the global rankings: When inequality goes up, social mobility goes down. Frankly, there’s almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A. Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.21 Don’t get me wrong – 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...

Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, had his lightbulb moment in the early 2000s. Homelessness in the state was out of control, with thousands of people sleeping under bridges, in parks, and on the streets of Utah’s cities. Police and social services had their hands full, and Pendleton was fed up. He also had a plan. In 2005, Utah launched its war on homelessness not, as so often, with Tasers and pepper spray, but by attacking the problem at the root. The goal? To get all the state’s homeless off the streets. The strategy? Free apartments. Pendleton started with the seventeen most abject street sleepers he could find. Two years later, after they all had a place to live, he progressively expanded the program. Criminal records, hopeless addictions, towering debts – none of it mattered. In Utah, having a roof over your head became a right.

Like poverty, solving the homelessness problem is preferable to merely managing it.31 The principle of “housing first,” as this strategy is called, has already circled the globe. Back in 2005, you couldn’t walk around downtown Amsterdam or Rotterdam without seeing people living out on the street. Homeless people were a particular problem around train stations, and a very expensive one at that. Consequently, as Lloyd Pendleton rolled out his plan in Utah, social workers, public officials, and politicians from major Dutch cities convened to figure out how to tackle this problem in the Netherlands. They drew up an action plan. The budget: $217 million. The aim: get all homeless people off the street. The site: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht first, then nationwide. The strategy: counseling and – sure enough – free housing for everyone. The timeline: February 2006 to February 2014. It was an unmitigated success. After just a couple of years, the problem of vagrancy in the big cities had been reduced by 65%. Drug use was down by half. The beneficiaries’ mental and physical health improved significantly, and park benches were finally vacant. By October 1, 2008, the program had brought nearly 6,500 homeless people in off the streets.32 And to top it off, the financial returns for society proved double the original investments.33

Richard Nixon was not the most likely candidate to pursue Thomas More’s old utopian dream, but then history sometimes has a strange sense of humor. The same man who was forced to resign after the Watergate scandal in 1974 had been on the verge, in 1969, of enacting an unconditional income for all poor families. It would have been a massive step forward in the War on Poverty, guaranteeing a family of four $1,600 a year, equivalent to roughly $10,000 in 2016.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Ford conducted a series of experiments which demonstrated that his factory workers were most productive when they worked a forty-hour week. Working an additional twenty hours would pay off for four weeks, but after that, productivity declined. Others took his experiments a step further. On December 1, 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate W. K. Kellogg decided to introduce a six-hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and slashed the accident rate by 41%. Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive. “This isn’t just a theory with us,” Kellogg proudly told a local newspaper. “The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”

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

Still the mayor refuses to budge. He has the local press on his side, which portrays the strikers as greedy narcissists. It takes a week before the realization begins to kick in: The garbagemen are actually going to win. “New York is helpless before them,” the editors of the New York Times declare despairingly. “This greatest of cities must surrender or see itself sink in filth.” Nine days into the strike, when the trash has piled up to 100,000 tons, the sanitation workers get their way. “The moral of New York’s latest step towards chaos,” Time magazine later reported, is “that it pays to strike.”

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. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all. 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. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.

The paper also interviewed a city sanitation worker. In 2006, Joseph Lerman, then twenty, got a call from the city informing him that he could report for duty as a collector. “I felt like I’d won the jackpot,” he recounts. Nowadays, Lerman gets up at 4 every morning to haul garbage bags for shifts of up to twelve hours. To his fellow New Yorkers, it’s only logical that he is well paid for his labors. “Honest,” the city spokesperson smiles, “these men and women aren’t known as the heroes of New York City for nothing.”

The big question is: Who’s profiting? Innovations in Silicon Valley trigger mass layoffs elsewhere. Just take webshops like Amazon. The emergence of online sellers led to the loss of millions of jobs in retail. 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. With each new road that was paved and each new canal that was dug, the costs of transport dropped another notch, making it increasingly easy for piano builders to export their wares. With their marketing clout and economies of scale, the big producers quickly overran small local suppliers. And as the world contracted further, the minor league players were driven from the field.

When Prophecies Fail “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” So opens Leon Festinger’s account of these events in When Prophecy Fails, first published in 1956 and a seminal text in social psychology to this day. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us is immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1 Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber. No, it’s when our political, ideological, or religious ideas are at stake that we get the most stubborn. We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go. Doing so affects our sense of identity and position in social groups – in our churches or families or circles of friends. One factor that certainly is not involved is stupidity. Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people a...