Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Men who spend a few weeks at home after the birth of a child devote more time to their wives, to their children, and to the kitchen stove than they would have otherwise. Plus, this effect lasts–are you ready for it?–for the rest of their lives. 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 Paternity leave is a Trojan horse with the potential to truly turn the tide in the struggle for gender equality.

Inequality? The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest workweeks. While the poor are working longer and longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise.

the objective here is not to plead for an end to the workweek. Quite the reverse. It’s time that women, the poor, and seniors got the chance to do more, not less, good work. Stable and meaningful work plays a crucial part in every life well lived.50 By the same token, forced leisure–getting fired–is a catastrophe. Psychologists have demonstrated that protracted unemployment has a greater impact on well-being than divorce or the loss of a loved one.51 Time heals all wounds, except unemployment.

Working less provides the bandwidth for other things that are also important to us, like family, community involvement, and recreation. Not coincidentally, the countries with the shortest workweeks also have the largest number of volunteers and the most social capital.

swimming in a sea of spare time will not be easy. A twenty-first-century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also (and more importantly) for life.

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. Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

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?

Over the last few decades, the supply of food has skyrocketed. In 2010, American cows produced twice as much milk as they did in 1970.6 Over that same period, the productivity of wheat has also doubled, and that of tomatoes has tripled. The better agriculture has become, the less we’re willing to pay for it. These days, the food on our plates has become dirt cheap.

the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

this shift generated more work in the service sector. Yet before we could get ourselves a job in this new world of consultants, accountants, programmers, advisors, brokers, and lawyers, we first had to earn the proper credentials. This development has generated immense wealth. Ironically, however, it has also created 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.

Irish started issuing their own cash. After the bank closures, they continued writing checks to one another as usual, the only difference being that they could no longer be cashed at the bank. Instead, that other dealer in liquid assets–the Irish pub–stepped in to fill the void. At a time when the Irish still stopped for a pint at their local pub at least three times a week, everyone–and especially the bartender–had a pretty good idea who could be trusted.

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.

the very fact that people began do-it-yourself banking makes it patently clear that they couldn’t do without some kind of financial sector. But what they could do perfectly well without was all the smoke and mirrors, all the risky speculation, the glittering skyscrapers, and the towering bonuses paid out of taxpayers’ pockets. “Maybe, just maybe,” the author and economist Umair Haque conjectures, “banks need people a lot more than people need banks.”11

In recent decades those clever minds have concocted all manner of complex financial products that don’t create wealth, but destroy it. These products are, essentially, like a tax on the rest of the population. Who do you think is paying for all those custom-tailored suits, sprawling mansions, and luxury yachts? If bankers aren’t generating the underlying value themselves, then it has to come from somewhere–or someone–else.

wealth can be concentrated somewhere, but that doesn’t also mean that’s where it’s being created.

We’re all working harder than ever. In the previous chapter, I described how we have sacrificed our free time on the altar of consumerism.

Our addiction to consumption is enabled mostly by robots and Third World wage slaves.

“Bullshit jobs,” Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.

studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative.

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 whose effectiveness has long been disproven.18

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 hyper complex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.

For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5–and often much more–is pumped back into the economy.

Though it may have bolstered the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, education has also been a source of new and tangible prosperity. If you were to draw up a list of the most influential professions, teacher would likely rank among the highest.

take an ordinary elementary school teacher. Forty years at the head of a class of twenty-five children amounts to influencing the lives of 1,000 children. Moreover, that teacher is molding pupils at an age when they’re at their most malleable. They’re still just children, after all. He or she not only equips them for the future, but in the process also has a direct hand in shaping that future.

All the big debates in education are about format. About delivery. About didactics. Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation–as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life.

The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On “problem-solving ability,” but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: 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.

What do we want? More time for friends, for example, or family? For volunteer work? Art? Sports? Future education would have to prepare us not only for the job market but, more fundamentally, for life. Do we want to rein in the financial sector? Then maybe we should give budding economists some instruction in philosophy and morals. Do we want more solidarity across race, sex, and socioeconomic groups? Start in social studies class. If we restructure education around our new ideals, the job market will happily tag along.

Half a century after the strike, the Big Apple seems to have learned its lesson. “EVERYONE IN NYC WANTS TO BE GARBAGE COLLECTOR,” read a recent newspaper headline. These days, the people who pick up after the megacity earn an enviable salary. After five years on the payroll, they can take home as much as $70,000 plus overtime and perks. “They keep the city running,”

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.

wage growth has been stagnating in most occupations for years even as productivity continues to grow. The foremost reason for this is simple: Labor is becoming less and less scarce. Technological advances are putting the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty in direct competition with billions of working people across the world, and in competition with machines themselves.

“winner-take-all society.”

it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

Some people in our modern Land of Plenty have even found themselves completely sidelined, despite being hale and hearty and eager to roll up their sleeves. Similar to the English draft horses at the turn of the twentieth century, they won’t find employers willing to hire them at any wage. Asian, African, or robot labor will always come cheaper. And while it’s still often more efficient to outsource work cheaply to Asia and Africa,29 the moment wages and technologies in those countries start to catch up, robots will win out even there. In the end, outsourcing is just a stepping-stone. Eventually, even the sweatshops in Vietnam and Bangladesh will be automated.30

“Machinery must work for us in coal mines,”

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.”

“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, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners.

Inequality will continue to increase and everybody who hasn’t managed to learn a skill that machines cannot or will not be able to master will be sidelined.

“Making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future,”

not much was needed to boost the earning capacity of a nation of farmers–just basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. Preparing our own children for the new century will be considerably more difficult, however, not to mention expensive. All the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.

Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.

The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. 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.

The Western world spends $134.8 billion a year, $11.2 billion a month, $4,274 a second on foreign development aid.1

Has it helped? Here’s where it gets tricky. There’s really only one way to answer this: Nobody knows.

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

the effects of free textbooks on Kenyan grade-school pupils.

The free books had made no difference. Test scores showed no improvement.10

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.

Thanks to RCTs, however, we know that $100 worth of free meals translates into an additional 2.8 years of educational attainment–three times as much as free uniforms. Speaking of proven impact, deworming children with intestinal complaints has been shown to yield 2.9 years of additional schooling for the absurdly small investment of $10 worth of treatment. No armchair philosopher could have predicted that, but since this finding was revealed, tens of millions of children have been dewormed.