Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Where 84% of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10%.

If you were to put an Italian peasant from 1300 in a time machine and drop him in 1870s Tuscany he wouldn’t notice much of a difference.

Six hundred years of civilization, and the average Italian was pretty much where he’d always been.

It was not until about 1880, right around the time Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison patented his lightbulb, Carl Benz was tinkering with his first car, and Josephine Cochrane was ruminating on what may just be the most brilliant idea ever–the dish-washer–that our Italian peasant got swept up in the march of progress. And what a wild ride it has been.

These days, there are more people suffering from obesity worldwide than from hunger.

number of people suffering from malnutrition has shrunk by more than a third since 1990.

More understood that utopia is dangerous when taken too seriously. “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,”

As people and societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies.

The modern creed–or worse, the belief that there’s nothing left to believe in–makes us blind to the shortsightedness and injustice that still surround us every day.

Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite be...

Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an...

Radical ideas about a different world have become almost literally unthinkable. The expectations of what we as a society can achieve have been dramatically eroded, leaving us with the cold, hard truth that without utopia, all that remains is a technocracy.

In fact, the twenty-first-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, as do our hospitals, schools, and TV networks. What counts is achieving targets. Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications–slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.

The only thing left for government to do is patch up life in the present. If you’re not following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen, the powers that be are happy to whip you into shape. Their tools of choice? Control, surveillance, and repression.

Meanwhile, the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms.

In the U.S., where the cost of healthcare is the highest on the planet, the life expectancy for many is actually going down.

she concluded that the average child living in early 1990s North America was more anxious than psychiatric patients in the early 1950s.

In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do,32 when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike.

And while young people in the West have largely come of age in an era of apolitical technocracy, we will have to return to politics again to find a new utopia.

“value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”

What we need are alternative horizons that spark the imagination.

Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

He gives them cash, in the conviction that the real experts on what poor people need are the poor people themselves.

Studies from all over the world offer proof positive: Free money works.

“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” notes economist Charles Kenny, “and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”

In their book Just Give Money to the Poor (2010), scholars at the University of Manchester furnish countless examples of cases where cash handouts with few or no strings attached have worked.

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.”

In fact, a major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.

But it gets even stranger. In Liberia, an experiment was conducted to see what would happen if you give $200 to the shiftiest of the poor. Alcoholics, addicts, and petty criminals were rounded up from the slums. Three years later, what had they spent the money on? Food, clothing, medicine, and small businesses.

journal the Lancet summed up their findings: When the poor receive no-strings cash they actually tend to work harder.

For the first time in history, we are actually rich enough to finance a sizable basic income.

Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would cost only $175 billion, less than 1% of GDP.

Winning the war on poverty would be a bargain compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which a Harvard study estimated have cost us a staggering $4–$6 trillion.

As a matter of fact, all the world’s developed countries had it within their means to wipe out poverty years ago.

One of the perks of a basic income is that it would free the poor from the welfare trap and spur them to seek a paid job with true opportunities for growth and advancement.

“The political right is afraid people will stop working,” laments Professor Forget in Canada, “and the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices.”

A basic income system would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever.

The old adage of “those unwilling to work will not get to eat” is now abused as a license for inequality.

because we’re richer than ever that it is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.

If, on the other hand, people’s psychiatric problems were not the cause but the consequence of poverty, then that $6,000 might genuinely work wonders.

Ten years after the casino’s arrival, Costello’s findings showed that the younger the age at which children escaped poverty, the better their teenage mental health.

Genes can’t be undone. Poverty can.

The long-term perspective goes out the window. “Scarcity consumes you,” Shafir explains. “You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.”

Compare it to a new computer that’s running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors, and eventually it freezes–not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has to do too much at once.

“Self-control feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day.” This is how scarcity–whether of time or of money–leads to unwise decisions.

So in concrete terms, just how much dumber does poverty make you? “Our effects correspond to between 13 and 14 IQ points,” Shafir says. “That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism.”

The mere thought of a major financial setback impaired their cognitive ability.

As long as inequality continues to rise, the gross domestic mental bandwidth will continue to contract.

But once there’s enough food on the table, a roof that doesn’t leak, and clean running water to drink, economic growth is no longer a guarantor of welfare. From that point on, equality is a much more accurate predictor.

What’s more, the world’s richest superpower (the U.S.) rates alongside a country with less than half the per capita GDP (Portugal) for the highest incidence of social problems.