Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

“You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.”

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.

What’s for dinner? and How will I make it to the end of the week? tax a crucial capacity. “Mental bandwidth,”

You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day.” This is how scarcity–whether of time or of money–leads to unwise decisions.

in addition to measuring our gross domestic product, maybe it’s time we also started considering our gross domestic mental bandwidth. Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees–you

eliminating poverty actually generated more money than the total of all casino payments through reductions in crime, use of care facilities, and repetition of school grades.

Kids who grow up poor end up with two years’ less educational attainment, work 450 fewer hours per year, and run three times the risk of all-round bad health than those raised in families that are well off. Investments in education won’t really help these kids, the researchers say.16 They have to get above the poverty line first.

A recent meta-analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of financial education came to a similar conclusion: Such education makes almost no difference at all.17 This is not to say no one learns anything–poor people can come out wiser, for sure. But it’s not enough. “It’s like teaching a person to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea,”

Educating people certainly isn’t entirely pointless, but it can only go so far in helping them to manage their ...

If you’d like to have more money, time, friends, or food, you’re more likely to experience a sense of scarcity. And 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.

Whether you look at the incidence of depression, burnout, drug abuse, high dropout rates, obesity, unhappy childhoods, low election turnout, or social and political distrust, the evidence points to the same culprit every time: inequality.

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. Nonetheless, in almost all developed countries today, inequality far exceeds what could reasonably be deemed desirable.

a drifter living on the street cost the government $16,670 a year (for social services, police, courts, etc.). An apartment plus professional counseling, by contrast, cost a modest $11,000.30

If you’re homeless, your main problem is no roof over your head. Speaking of which, in Europe, the number of vacant houses is double the number of homeless.36 In the U.S., there are five empty homes for each person without one.37

Historians don’t believe in hard and fast laws of progress or economics; the world is governed not by abstract forces, but by people who plot their own course.

Speenhamland was the textbook example of a government program that had, with the best of intentions, paved the road to hell.

Malthus was wrong about the population explosion, which was attributable chiefly to growing demand for child labor. At the time, children were like walking piggy banks, their earnings a kind of pension plan for parents. Even now, as soon as populations escape poverty, birth rates drop and people find other ways to invest in their future.

the caseworkers appointed to help claimants find a job often cost more than unemployment benefits.

spending a workweek attending pointless workshops or performing mindless tasks leaves less time for parenting, education, and looking for a real job.

A welfare mother with two kids has her benefits cut because she hasn’t sufficiently developed her job skills. The government saves a couple thousand bucks, but the hidden costs of children who will consequently grow up poor, eat poor food, get poor grades at school, an...

The GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.

You’ve overlooked a huge part of the picture. Community service, clean air, free refills on the house–none of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.

Wikipedia. Supported by investments of time rather than money, it has left the old Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust–and taken the GDP down a few notches in the process.

“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

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. The idea that the GDP still serves as an accurate gauge of social welfare is one of the most widespread myths of our times.

The meaning of the term “national income” has actually never been fixed, fluctuating with the latest intellectual currents and the imperatives of the moment. Every era has its own idiosyncratic ideas about what defines a country’s wealth. Take Adam Smith, father of modern economics, who believed that the wealth of nations was founded not only on agriculture, but also on manufacturing. The entire service economy, by contrast–a sector that spans everything from entertainers to lawyers and constitutes roughly two-thirds of the modern economy–Smith argued “adds to the value of nothing.”18

The GDP, it turned out, was an excellent yardstick for the power of a nation in times of war.

“Without measures of economic aggregates like GDP, policymakers would be adrift in a sea of unorganized data,” he continued. “The GDP and related data are like beacons that help policymakers steer the economy toward the key economic objectives.”21

To calculate the GDP, numerous data points have to be linked together and hundreds of wholly subjective choices made regarding what to count and what to ignore. In spite of this methodology, the GDP is never presented as anything less than hard science, whose fractional vacillations can make the difference between reelection and political annihilation.

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.

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. But today it’s no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros.

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.

Happy Planet Index, a ranking that factors in ecological footprints, in which most developed countries figure somewhere around the middle and the U.S. dangles near the bottom?

In our race against the machine, it’s only logical that we’ll continue to spend less on products that can be easily made more efficiently and more on labor-intensive services and amenities such as art, healthcare, education, and safety.

When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs.

To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of the costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability.30

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.

it’s precisely because we need to change our actions that we need new figures to guide us.

it’s up to us to reconsider these old questions. What is growth? What is progress? Or even more fundamentally, what makes life truly worthwhile?

it was none other than Henry Ford–titan of industry, founder of Ford Motor Company, and creator of the Model-T–who, in that same year, became the first to implement a five-day workweek.

Henry Ford had discovered that a shorter workweek actually increased productivity among his employees.

Asimov was cautious: The robots of 2014 would “neither be common nor very good.” But in other respects, his expectations were high. Cars would be cruising through the air and entire cities would be built underwater. There was just one thing, ultimately, that worried him: the spread of boredom. Mankind, he wrote, would become “largely a race of machine tenders,” and there would be “serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences.” Psychiatry would be the largest medical specialty in 2014 due to the millions of people who found themselves adrift in a sea of “enforced leisure.” “Work,” he said, would become “the most glorious single word in the vocabulary.”

“Leisure, thought by many to be the epitome of paradise, may well become the most perplexing problem of the future.”12

If you include unpaid labor, women in Europe and North America work more than men.

the main argument that has been brought to bear against the shorter workweek: We can’t afford it. More leisure is a wonderful ideal, but it’s simply too expensive. If we were all to work less, our standard of living would collapse and the welfare state would crumble.

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.

Stress? Countless studies have shown that people who work less are more satisfied with their lives.

Climate change? A worldwide shift to a shorter workweek could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half.39 Countries with a shorter workweek have a smaller ecological footprint.40 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: Tired surgeons are more prone to slip-ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.

work sharing–in which two part-time employees share a workload traditionally assigned to one full-time worker–went a long way toward resolving the last crisis.42 Particularly in times of recession with spiking unemployment and production exceeding demand, sharing jobs can help to soften the blow.