Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Utopias offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions.

Not until men do their fair share of cooking, cleaning, and other domestic labor will women be free to fully participate in the broader economy.

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

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%.

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%.27 At the very top, the comparisons get even more skewed. In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people.28 And just eight people–the richest people on Earth–own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.29

Calling my ideas “unrealistic” was simply a shorthand way of saying they didn’t fit the status quo.