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April 21 - May 4, 2023
“Progress is the realization of Utopias,”
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.
“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,”
societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies.
quality is being replaced by quantity.
driving it all is a force sometimes called “liberalism,” an ideology that has been all but hollowed out. What’s important now is to “just be yourself ” and “do your thing.”
The public arena should be “neutral,” after all–yet never before has it been so paternalistic.
Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.
the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms
If success is a choice, then so is failure.
Where our grandparents still toed the lines imposed by family, church, and country, we’re hemmed in by the media, marketing, and a paternalistic state.
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.
alternative horizons that spark the imagination.
Without utopia, we are lost.
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.
GiveDirectly’s cash grants spur a lasting rise in incomes (up 38% from before the infusion) and also boost homeownership and possession of livestock (up 58%), while reducing the number of days that children go hungry by 42%.
“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,”
Study after study has shown that they cost a lot but achieve little, whether the objective is learning to fish, read, or run a business.18 “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.”
When the poor receive no-strings cash they actually tend to work harder.22 In the final report on the Namibian experiment, a bishop offered this neat biblical explanation. “Look in depth at Exodus 16,” he wrote, “the people of Israel in the long journey out of slavery, they received manna from heaven. But,” he continued, “it did not make them lazy; instead, it enabled them to be on the move…”
In March 1973, the provincial governor earmarked a sum of $83 million in modern U.S. dollars for the project.
“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn’t want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn’t work,” one of the researchers recounted. “And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn’t favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”
Forget’s most remarkable finding, though, was that hospitalizations decreased by as much as 8.5%.
Mincome had made the whole town healthier. Forget could even trace the impacts of receiving a basic income through to the next generation, both in earnings and in health.
The researchers wanted answers to three questions: (1) Would people work significantly less if they receive a guaranteed income? (2) Would the program be too expensive? (3) Would it prove politically unfeasible? The answers were no, no, and yes.
Most vehemently opposed, however, were the Democrats. They felt the FAP didn’t go far enough, and pushed for an even higher basic income.44 After months of being batted back and forth between the Senate and the White House, the bill was finally canned.
A basic income, evidently, gave women too much independence. Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.
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.
It’s an ingrained reflex among those on the left to make every plan, every credit, and every benefit income dependent. The problem is, that tendency is counter-productive.
The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame.
However, the lion’s share of the takings went directly into the pockets of the 8,000 men, women, and children of the Eastern Band Cherokee tribe. From $500 a year at the outset, their earnings from the casino quickly mounted to $6,000 in 2001, constituting a quarter to a third of the average family income.
Professor Costello calculated that the extra $4,000 per annum resulted in an additional year of educational attainment by age twenty-one and reduced the chance of a criminal record at age sixteen by 22%.
the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk.
Genes can’t be undone. Poverty can.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect.”9 Though not many politicians would go quite so far, this view that the solution resides with the individual is not exceptional.
Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.
“Scarcity consumes you,”
Poor people have an analogous problem. 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.
Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees–you name it. “Fighting scarcity could even reduce costs,” projects Shafir.
In the U.S., where more than one in five children grow up poor, countless studies have already shown that anti-poverty measures actually work as a cost-cutting instrument.
The fruits of the scholarship fall well outside the tunnel vision of the scarcity mindset.
The nudge epitomizes an era in which politics is concerned chiefly with combating symptoms.
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.20
The fact is they both matter, and these two forms of inequality are inextricable.
When inequality goes up, social mobility goes down.
the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.22
“Income inequality,” say two leading scientists who have studied twenty-four developed countries, “makes us all less happy with our lives, even if we’re relatively well-off.”24
mercantilist for his top tip, it would be lower wages–the lower the better. Cheap labor hones your competitive edge and therefore boosts exports.
By now we’ve learned that wealth begets more wealth, whether you’re talking about people or about nations.
“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,”
