Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

“psychosocial consequences” are such that people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them. This undercuts the quality of relationships (manifested in a distrust of strangers and status anxiety, for example). The resulting stress, in turn, is a major determinant of illness and chronic health problems.

Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.

Sadly, instead of trying to cure the ailment, we continually opt to fight the symptoms, with police chasing vagrants around, doctors treating rough sleepers only to turn them back out onto the streets, and social workers applying Band-Aid solutions to festering wounds.

Because whether you’re talking about Dutch drifters, Indian sugarcane farmers, or Cherokee children, fighting poverty is good not only for our conscience, but for our wallets, too.

“Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.”

These days, the idea of a basic income for all Americans is, in Steensland’s words, as “unthinkable” as “women’s suffrage and equal rights for racial minorities” were in the past.33 It’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever be able to shake off the dogma that if you want money, you have to work for it. That a president as recent and as conservative as Richard Nixon once sought to implement a basic income seems to have evaporated from the collective memory.

Whereas employees are expected to demonstrate their strengths, social services expects claimants to demonstrate their shortcomings; to prove over and over that an illness is sufficiently debilitating, that a depression is sufficiently bleak, and that chances of getting hired are sufficiently slim. Otherwise your benefits are cut.

This isn’t a war on poverty; it’s a war on the poor. There’s no surer way to turn those on the bottom rungs of society–including geniuses like Orwell–into a legion of lazy, frustrated, and even aggressive bums and freeloaders.

If there’s one thing that we capitalists have in common with the communists of old, it’s a pathological obsession with gainful employment. 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.

the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.

The GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power. To which Bastiat would respond: You’ve overlooked a huge part of the picture. Community service, clean air, free refills on the house–none of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.

If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.

Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime–in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems.

“If banking had been subtracted from the GDP, rather than added to it,” the Financial Times recently reported, “it is plausible to speculate that the financial crisis would never have happened.”

The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of car mechanics.

The first person to argue that what matters is not the nature but the price of products was the economist Alfred Marshall

“the economy,” they usually just meant “society.” But the 1950s introduced a new generation of technocrats who invented a whole new objective: getting the “economy” to “grow.”

“The gross national product… measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile,”

Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency. While we can produce coffee machines ever faster and more cheaply, a violinist can’t pick up the pace without spoiling the tune.

it’s only logical that we’ll continue to spend less on products that can be easily made more efficiently and more on labor-intensive services and amenities such as art, healthcare, education, and safety.

sector. Their governments subsidize the domains where productivity can’t be leveraged. Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor’s checkups can’t simply be made “more efficient.”

you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. 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.

into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “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.

The GDP was contrived in a period of deep crisis and provided an answer to the great challenges of the 1930s. As we face our own crises of unemployment, depression, and climate change, we, too, will have to search for a new figure.

“Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth,”

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.

We’re even willing to trade in precious purchasing power for more free time.

Working less provides the bandwidth for other things that are also important to us, like family, community involvement, and recreation. Not coincidentally, the countries with the shortest workweeks also have the largest number of volunteers and the most social capital.

It all starts with reversing incentives. Currently, it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime than to hire two part-time.54 That’s because many labor costs, such as healthcare benefits, are paid per employee instead of per hour.55 And that’s also why we as individuals can’t just unilaterally decide to start working less. By doing so we would risk losing status, missing out on career opportunities, and, ultimately, maybe losing our jobs altogether.

In overworked countries like Japan, Turkey, and, of course, the United States, people watch an absurd amount of television.

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

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

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity–the teachers, the police officers, the nurses–are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

the U.S. financial sector is seven times as large as its agricultural sector.

Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.

The government isn’t the only one redistributing wealth. The financial sector does it, too, but without a democratic mandate. The bottom line is that wealth can be concentrated somewhere, but that doesn’t also mean that’s where it’s being created.

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

The more wealth is concentrated at the top, the greater the demand for corporate attorneys, lobbyists, and high-frequency traders.

In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hyper complex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.

Imagine that all this talent were to be invested not in shifting wealth around, but in creating it. Who knows, we might already have had jetpacks, built submarine cities, or cured cancer.

If we imposed a transactions tax–where you would have to pay a fee each time you buy or sell a stock–those high-frequency traders who contribute almost nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets.

The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5–and often much more–is pumped back into the economy.

developing countries with an even shorter end of the stick. If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential twenty-first-century skill. Not because the law or the market or technology demand it, but solely because that, apparently, is how we prefer to earn our money.

Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living.

The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.

In the end, it’s not the market or technology that decides what has real value, but society. If we want this century to be one in which all of us get richer, then we’ll need to free ourselves of the dogma that all work is meaningful. And, while we’re at it, let’s also get rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value.

this dynamic back in the late nineteenth century: The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners.

In the age of the chip, the box, and Internet retail, being just fractionally better than the rest means you’ve not only won the battle, you’ve won the war. Economists call this phenomenon the “winner-take-all society.”

By now, inequality is ballooning in almost every developed country. In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome–an economy founded on slave labor.