Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

In the past, everything was worse. For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.

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

For a long time, the Land of Plenty was reserved for a small elite in the wealthy West. Those days are over. Since China has opened itself to capitalism, 700 million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty.7 Africa, too, is fast shedding its reputation for economic devastation; the continent is now home to six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies.8 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 And between 1994 and 2014, the number of people with Internet access worldwide leaped from 0.4% to 40.4%.10

The share of the world population that survives on fewer than 2,000 calories a day has dropped from 51% in 1965 to 3% in 2005.13

In most countries, the average IQ has gone up another three to five points every ten years, thanks chiefly to improved nutrition and education.

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.”

There’s no new dream to replace it because we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got. In fact, most people in wealthy countries believe children will actually be worse off than their parents.19 But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

let’s first distinguish between two forms of utopian thought.22 The first is the most familiar, the utopia of the blueprint.

Instead of abstract ideals, blueprints consist of immutable rules that tolerate no dissension.

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 strait-jacket, it inspires us to change. And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

utopia is dangerous when taken too seriously. “One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them,”

As people and societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies. The modern creed–or worse, the belief that there’s nothing left to believe in–makes us blind to the shortsightedness and injustice that still surround us every day. To give a few examples: Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all? And why is more than 60% of your income dependent on the country where you just happen to have been born?

Politics has been watered down to problem management. Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate.25

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.

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.

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

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.33

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.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well.

Without utopia, we are lost. Not that the present is bad; on the contrary. However, it is bleak, if we have no hope of anything better.

In recent years, government assistance has become increasingly anchored in employment, with recipients required to apply for jobs, enroll in return-to-work programs, and do mandatory “volunteer” work. Touted as a shift “from welfare to workfare,” the underlying message is clear: Free money makes people lazy. Except that, according to the evidence, it doesn’t.

“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.

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.

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?

“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.”

In Liberia, an experiment was conducted to see what would happen if you give $200 to the shiftiest of the poor. Alcoholics, addicts, and petty criminals were rounded up from the slums. Three years later, what had they spent the money on? Food, clothing, medicine, and small businesses. “If these men didn’t throw away free money,” one of the researchers wondered, “who would?”

Yet the “lazy poor people” argument is trotted out time and again.

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.”27 No inspectors looking over your shoulder to see if you’ve spent it wisely, nobody questioning if it’s really deserved.

In March 1973, the provincial governor earmarked a sum of $83 million in modern U.S. dollars for the project.30 He chose Dauphin, a small town of 13,000 northwest of Winnipeg, as the location of the experiment. Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income, ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. In practice, this meant 30% of the town’s inhabitants–1,000 families in all–got a check in the mail each month. A family of four received what would now be around $19,000 a year, no questions asked.

In the end, total work hours only notched down 1% for men, 3% for married women, and 5% for unmarried women. Men who were family breadwinners hardly worked less at all, while new mothers used the cash assistance to take several months’ maternity leave, and students to stay in school longer.33 Forget’s most remarkable finding, though, was that hospitalizations decreased by as much as 8.5%. Considering the size of public spending on healthcare in the developed world, the financial implications were huge. Several years into the experiment, domestic violence was also down, as were mental-health complaints. Mincome had made the whole town healthier.

the chief data analyst of the Denver experiment said. “There is not anywhere near the mass defection the prophets of doom predicted.” The reduction in paid work averaged 9% per family, and in every state it was mostly the twenty somethings and women with young children who worked less.34

utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace.

Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.

Futile? For the first time in history, we are actually rich enough to finance...

Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, less than 1% of GDP.48 That’s roughly a quarter of U.S. military spending.

Dangerous? Certainly, some people may opt to work less, but then that’s precisely the point. A handful of artists and writers (“all those whom society despises while they are alive and honors when they are dead”–Bertrand Russell) might actually stop doing paid work altogether. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people actually want to work, whether they need to or not.54 In fact, not having a job makes us deeply unhappy.

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.

Perverse? On the contrary, it is the welfare system that has devolved into a perverse behemoth of control and humiliation.

The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame.

A basic income system would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever.

In recent decades the middle class has retained its spending power by borrowing itself into ever-deeper debt. But this model isn’t viable, as we now know. The old adage of “those unwilling to work will not get to eat” is now abused as a license for inequality. 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: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.

We, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, are rich thanks to the institutions, the knowledge, and the social capital amassed for us by our forebears. This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.

the money helped ease the pressure on families, so the energy they’d spent worrying about money was now freed up for their children. And that “helps parents be better parents,”

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?

The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthfully. Offer money-management training and the poor are the last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire.

psychology of scarcity,

the perception of scarcity is not ubiquitous. An empty schedule feels different than a jam-packed workday. And that’s not some harmless little feeling. Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.

People who experience a sense of scarcity are good at managing their short-term problems. Poor people have an incredible ability–in the short term–to make ends meet, the same way that overworked CEOs can power through to close a deal.

You Can’t Take a Break from Poverty

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.