Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

the three I’s of development aid: Ideology, Ignorance, and Inertia.

be idealist without becoming ideological.

development aid, no matter how effective, is always just a drop in the bucket.

The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.16 Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could.

the only purpose of economic forecasts is to give astrology a better image),

On the eve of World War I, borders existed mostly as lines on paper. Passports were rare and the countries that did issue them (like Russia and the Ottoman Empire) were seen as uncivilized. Besides, that wonder of nineteenth-century technology, the train, was poised to erase borders for good. And then the war broke out. Suddenly, borders were sealed to keep spies out and everybody needed for the war effort in. At a 1920 conference in Paris, the international community came to the first ever agreements on the use of passports.

According to the International Monetary Fund, lifting the remaining restrictions on capital would free up at most $65 billion.22 Pocket change, according to Harvard economist Lant Pritchett. Opening borders to labor would boost wealth by much more–one thousand times more. In numbers: $65,000,000,000,000. In words: sixty-five trillion dollars.

Say John from Texas is dying of hunger. He asks me for food, but I refuse. If John dies, is it my fault? Arguably, I merely allowed him to die, which while not exactly benevolent, isn’t exactly murder either. Now imagine that John doesn’t ask for food, but goes off to the market, where he’ll find plenty of people willing to exchange their goods for work that he can do in return. This time though, I hire a couple of heavily armed baddies to block his way. John dies of starvation a few days later. Can I still claim innocence? The story of John is the story of our “everything except labor” brand of globalization.23

Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.26

A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%.

Even food-stamp recipients in the U.S. live like royalty compared to the poorest people in the world. Still, we mostly reserve our outrage for the injustices that happen inside our own national borders. We’re indignant that men get paid more than women for doing the same work, and that white Americans earn more than black Americans. But even the 150% racial income gap of the 1930s pales in comparison to the injustices inflicted by our borders. A Mexican citizen living and working in the U.S. earns more than twice as much as a compatriot still living in Mexico. An American earns nearly three times as much for the same work as a Bolivian, even when they are of the same skill level, age, and sex. With a comparable Nigerian, the difference is a factor of 8.5–and that’s adjusted for purchasing power in the two countries.33

In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.34 Yet this modern elite is scarcely aware of how lucky it is.

it’s an idea that keeps getting beaten back by the same old faulty arguments. (1) They’re all terrorists If you follow the news, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking so. Because the news consists of what happened today (BREAKING NEWS: TERROR ATTACK IN PARIS) and not what happens every day (BREAKING NEWS: THE WORLD’S TEMPERATURE RISES BY 0.00005 °C) many believe that terrorism is the biggest threat we face.

(2) They’re all criminals Not according to the data. As it happens, people making a new life in the U.S. commit fewer offenses and less frequently end up in prison than the native population.

The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up.

(3) They will undermine social cohesion

if diversity isn’t to blame for the lack of cohesion in modern-day society, what is? The answer is simple: poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. “It is not the diversity of a community that undermines trust,” conclude Abascal and Baldassarri, “but rather the disadvantages that people in diverse communities face.”

(4) They’ll take our jobs

A bigger workforce means more consumption, more demand, more jobs.

(5) Cheap immigrant labor will force our wages down

emigration out of a country had a negative effect on wages in Europe.47 Low-skilled workers got the shortest end of the stick. Over these same years, immigrants were more productive and better educated than typically assumed, even serving to motivate less skilled natives to measure up.

(6) They’re too lazy to work

if you correct for income and job status, immigrants actually take less advantage of public assistance.

Countries could also decide not to give immigrants the right to government assistance, or not until after a minimum number of years, or not until they’ve paid, say, $50,000 in taxes.

You can create language and culture tests. You can withhold the right to vote. And you can send them back if they don’t find a job. Unfair? Perhaps so. Yet isn’t the alternative of keeping people out altogether exponentially more unfair?

However disruptive, migration has time and again proven to be one of the most powerful drivers of progress.

If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world’s poor would have $305 billion more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank.56 That’s the combined total of all development aid–times three.

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.”

“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

One factor that certainly is not involved is stupidity. Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody.2 After all, an education gives you tools to defend your opinions. Intelligent people are highly practiced in finding arguments, experts, and studies that underpin their preexisting beliefs, and the Internet has made it easier than ever to be consumers of our own opinions, with another piece of evidence always just a mouse-click away. Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.3

Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense.

Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all.

A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.

London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”

it is the duty of thinkers to keep offering alternatives. Ideas that seem “politically impossible” today may one day become “politically inevitable.”

“Only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change,” Friedman explained. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

On the one hand, the world is still getting richer, safer, and healthier. Every day, more and more people are arriving in Cockaigne. That’s a huge triumph. On the other hand, it’s high time that we, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, staked out a new utopia.

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.

politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable.

Anybody who forays outside the “Overton window” faces a rocky road. He or she will quickly be branded as “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” by the media, the fear-some gatekeepers of the window. Television, for example, offers little time or space to present fundamentally different opinions. Instead, talk shows feed us an endless merry-go-round of the same people saying the same things.

proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.

Donald Trump in the U.S., Boris Johnson in the U.K., and the Islamophobic Geert Wilders in my own country have all mastered this art to perfection. If they are not always taken seriously, they have certainly pulled the Overton window into their camps.

too often, it seems as if those on the left actually like losing. As if all the failure, the doom, and the atrocities mainly serve to prove they were right all along. “There’s a kind of activism,” Rebecca Solnit remarks in her book Hope in the Dark, “that’s more about bolstering identity than achieving results.”

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes simple matters dizzyingly complex. If you can’t explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent twelve-year-old, after all, it’s probably your own fault. What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people.

Reforms? Hell, yes. Let’s give the financial sector a real overhaul. Force banks to build bigger buffers so they don’t topple as soon as another crisis rolls around. Break them up, if need be, so that next time taxpayers won’t be left footing the bill because the banks are “too big to fail.” Expose and destroy all tax havens, so that the rich can finally be made to cough up their fair share and their accountants can do something worthwhile. Meritocracy? Bring it on. Let’s finally pay people according to their real contributions. Waste collectors, nurses, and teachers would get a substantial raise, obviously, while quite a few lobbyists, lawyers, and bankers would see their salaries dive into the negatives. If you want to do a job that hurts the public, go right ahead. But you’ll have to pay for the privilege with a heftier tax. Innovation? Totally. Even now, a vast amount of talent is going wasted. If Ivy League grads once went on to jobs in science, public service, and education, these days they’re far more likely to opt for banking, law, or ad proliferators like Google and Facebook. Stop for a moment to ponder the billions of tax dollars being pumped into training society’s best brains, all so they can learn how to exploit other people as efficiently as possible, and it makes your head spin. Imagine how different things might be if our generation’s best and brightest were to double down on the greatest challenges of our times. Climate change, for example, and the aging p...

Apparently, in modern capitalism we finance the things we find genuinely fulfilling with… bullshit.

When I call for a shorter workweek, I’m not pushing for long, lethargic weekends. I’m calling for us to spend more time on the things that truly matter to us.

it’s time for a new labor movement. One that fights not only for more jobs and higher wages, but more importantly for work that has intrinsic value. Then we’ll see unemployment rise when we spend more time on mind-numbing marketing, asinine administration, and polluting junk, and drop when we start investing more time in the things that fulfill us.

Everyone who reckons themselves progressive should be a beacon of not just energy but ideas, not only indignation but hope, and equal parts ethics and hard sell. Ultimately, what the underdog socialist lacks is the most vital ingredient for political change: the conviction that there truly is a better way. That utopia really is within reach.

that there are more people out there like you. Lots and lots of people. I’ve met countless readers who told me that while they believe absolutely in the ideas from this book, they see the world as a corrupt and greedy place. My answer to them was this: turn off the TV, look around you, and organize. Most people really do have their hearts in the right place. And second, my advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what. If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible. Remember: