Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Giving away free housing, it turned out, was actually a windfall for the state budget. State economists calculated that 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 poor, your main problem is no money. If you’re homeless, your main problem is no roof over your head.

the U.S., there are five empty homes for each person without one.37

1969, of enacting an unconditional income for all poor families. It would have been a massive step forward in the War on Poverty, guaranteeing a family of four $1,600 a year, equivalent to roughly $10,000 in 2016.

Martin Anderson was an advisor to the president and vehemently opposed to the plan. Anderson greatly admired the writer Ayn Rand, whose utopia revolved around the free market, and the concept of a basic income ran counter to the ideals of small government and individual responsibility that he held dear.

What Nixon failed to foresee was that his rhetoric of fighting laziness among the poor and unemployed would ultimately turn the country against basic income and the welfare state as a whole.

historians took another look at the Royal Commission Report on Speenhamland and discovered that much of the text had been written before any data was even collected.

Of the questionnaires distributed, only 10% were ever filled out. Furthermore, the questions were leading, with the answer choices all fixed in advance. And almost none of the people interviewed were actual beneficiaries. The evidence, such as it was, came mostly from the local elite, and especially the clergy, whose general view was that the poor were only growing more wicked and lazy.

Royal Commission Report was based on bogus science yet still managed to redirect President Nixon’s course of action 150 years later.

There was no poverty trap in the Speenhamland system and wage earners were permitted to keep their allowance–at least in part–even if their earnings increased.16

was more plentiful than ever, yet a decreasing share of the English population could afford it. Not because they were lazy, but because they were losing the race against the machine.

Believing workhouses to be the only effective remedy against sloth and depravity, the Royal Commission forced the poor into senseless slave labor, from breaking stones to walking on treadmills.

On entering the workhouse, spouses were separated and children taken away from their parents, never to be seen again. Women were starved as a precaution against pregnancy.

Far from helping the poor, it was this specter of the workhouse that enabled employers to keep wages so miserably low.

In 1996 the Democratic president Bill Clinton finally pulled the plug on “the welfare state as we know it.” For the first time since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, assistance for the poor was again seen as a favor instead of a right.

“History will shame them.”30 Meanwhile, child poverty in the U.S. climbed back to the level of 1964, when the War on Poverty, and Moynihan’s career, first began.

Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of “activating” policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training.

problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply.

economists have denounced this unemployment industry all along.34 Some return-to-work programs even prolong unemployment,35 and the caseworkers appointed to help claimants find a job often cost more than unemployment benefits.

The current tangle of red tape keeps people trapped in poverty. It actually produces dependence.

This isn’t a war on poverty; it’s a war on the poor.

Just as Soviet-era shops employed “three clerks to sell a piece of meat,” we’ll force benefit claimants to perform pointless tasks, even if it bankrupts us.38

Capitalist or communist, it all boils down to a pointless distinction between two types of poor, and to a major misconception that we almost managed to dispel some forty years ago–the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.

The gross national product… measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile.

“There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich,” said Oscar Wilde, “and that is the poor.”17

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

depression and war, the GDP emerged as the ultimate yardstick of progress–the crystal ball of nations, the number to trump all others.

the United Nations published its first standard guideline for figuring GDP in 1953, it totaled just under fifty pages. The most recent edition, issued in 2008, comes in at 722.

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.

The GDP is not a clearly defined object just waiting around to be “measured.” To measure GDP is to seek to measure an idea.

Indeed, during wartime, there’s no metric quite as useful as the GDP.

But today it’s no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we’re all still fixated on “efficiency” and “gains,” as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it’s precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail.

“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”26

“Discontent,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”27

GPI has advanced a good deal slower than GDP, and in the U.S. it has even receded since the 1970s.

not if we don’t know what is being measured.

Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency.

Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor’s checkups can’t simply be made “more efficient.”29

They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease.

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 targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To

“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”

Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

Behind every statistic is a certain set of assumptions and prejudices.

Kuznets grew increasingly concerned about the monster he had created. “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth,” he wrote in 1962, “between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”34

John Stuart Mill, was arguing that the best use of more wealth was more leisure.

According to Mill, technology should be used to curb the workweek as far as possible. “There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress,” he wrote, “as much room for improving the Art of Living.”2

“What do the poor want with holidays?” an English duchess wondered toward the end of the nineteenth century. “They ought to work!”3 Too much free time was simply an invitation to wickedness.

well-rested worker was a more effective worker. And besides, an employee toiling at a factory from dawn till dusk, with no free time for road trips or joy rides, would never buy one of his cars. As Ford told a journalist, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”6

In 1933, the U.S. Senate approved legislation introducing a thirty-hour workweek. Although the bill languished in the House of Representatives under industry pressure, a shorter workweek remained the labor unions’ top priority.