Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

In 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon promised Americans that they would only have to work four days a week “in the not too distant future.”

1974, the U.S. Department of the Interior sounded the alarm, declaring that “Leisure, thought by many to be the epitome of paradise, may well become the most perplexing problem of the future.”12 Despite these concerns, there was little doubt about the course history would ultimately take. By around 1970, sociologists talked confidently of the imminent “end of work.” Mankind was on the brink of a veritable leisure

In the 1980s, workweek reductions came to a grinding halt. Economic growth was translating not into more leisure, but into more stuff.

In the U.S., it actually grew. Seventy years after the country passed the forty-hour workweek into law, three-quarters of the labor force was putting in more than forty hours a week.16

you include unpaid labor, women in Europe and North America work more than men.19 “My grandma didn’t have the vote, my mom didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have any time,” as a Dutch comedienne pithily summed it up.20

work and leisure are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle.

managers and professionals in Europe, Asia, and North America now spend eighty to ninety hours per week “either working, or ‘monitoring’ work and remaining accessible.”

We aren’t bored to death; we’re working ourselves to death.

The army of psychologists and psychiatrists are fighting not the advance of ennui, but an epidemic of stress.

Ironically, medieval people were probably closer to achieving the contented idleness of the Land of Plenty than we are today.

When the five-day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%.34

Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.36

Since then, social mores have flipped. Nowadays, excessive work and pressure are status symbols.

dour priests and salesmen of the nineteenth century who believed that the plebs wouldn’t be able to handle getting the vote, or a decent wage, or, least of all, leisure, and who backed the seventy-hour workweek as an efficacious instrument in the fight against liquor. But the irony is that it was precisely in overworked, industrialized cities that more and more people sought refuge in the bottle.

True leisure, however, is neither a luxury nor a vice. It is as vital to our brains as vitamin C is to our bodies.

A twenty-first-century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also (and more importantly) for life.

The garbage men are actually going to win. “New York is helpless before them,” the editors of the New York Times declare despairingly. “This greatest of cities must surrender or see itself sink in filth.”

Instead of growing the pie, the explosive expansion of the banking sector has increased the share it serves itself.4

Up until a few centuries ago, almost everybody worked in agriculture. That left an affluent upper class free to loaf around, live off their private assets, and wage war–all hobbies that don’t create wealth but at best shift it about, or at worst destroy it.

Something quite simple: The 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. “The managers of these retail outlets and public houses had a high degree of information about their customers,” explains the economist Antoin Murphy. “One does not after all serve drink to someone for years without discovering something of his liquid resources.”9

By the time the banks finally reopened in November, the Irish had printed an incredible £5 billion in homemade currency.

According to historians, the reason the Irish were able to manage so well without banks was all down to social cohesion.

Indeed, 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

Making money without creating anything of value is anything but easy. It takes talent, ambition, and brains. And the banking world is brimming with clever minds. “The

those clever minds have concocted all manner of complex financial products that don’t create wealth, but destroy it.

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

It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”14

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Is it any coincidence that the proliferation of well-paid bullshit jobs has coincided with a huge boom in higher education and an economy that revolves around knowledge?

The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality, and innovation.

All that really matters is profit.

In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate.

I’d like to offer two final pieces of advice for everybody who is ready to put the ideas proposed in these pages into action. First, realize 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: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.