Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Precisely when we should be shouldering the historic task of investing this rich, safe, and healthy existence with meaning, we’ve buried utopia instead. 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.

Meaning more than existence

“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,” observes philosopher and leading utopia expert Lyman Tower Sargent.

Optimism and pessimism have become synonymous with consumer confidence or the lack thereof. 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. Politics has been watered down to problem management. Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate.25 We see it in journalism, which portrays politics as a game in which the stakes are not ideals, but careers. We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. 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. And 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.” Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom. Our fear of moralizing in any form has made morality a taboo in the public debate. The public arena should be “neutral,” after ...

Those who prefer the status quo

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.

Lest there be any misunderstanding: 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. 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.

True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”

Without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost.

Free money makes people lazy. Except that, according to the evidence, it doesn’t.

And thus, in the revolutionary year of 1968, when young demonstrators the world over were taking to the streets, five famous economists–John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Watts, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Lampman–wrote an open letter to Congress. “The country will not have met its responsibility until everyone in the nation is assured an income no less than the officially recognized definition of poverty,” they said in an article published on the front page of the New York Times. According to the economists, the costs would be “substantial, but well within the nation’s economic and fiscal capacity.”38 The letter was signed by 1,200 fellow economists.

According to renowned economist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia).

The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “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.”

“It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto.

We, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, are rich thanks to the institutions, the knowledge, and the social capital amassed for us by our forebears. This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.

So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983)

Questions like What’s for dinner? and How will I make it to the end of the week? tax a crucial capacity. “Mental bandwidth,” Shafir and Mullainathan call it. “If you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with your mind elsewhere,” they write. “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.

“Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries,” concludes the British researcher Richard Wilkinson. “As you get more and more of anything, each addition… contributes less and less to your well-being.”

But hold on. What should it matter if some people are filthy rich, when even those who are the hardest up today are better off than the kings of a few centuries ago? A lot. Because it’s all about relative poverty. However wealthy a country gets, inequality always rains on the parade.

The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: Things could be different. The way our world is organized is not the result of some axiomatic evolution. Our current status quo could just as easily be the result of the trivial yet critical twists and turns of history. Historians don’t believe in hard and fast laws of progress or economics; the world is governed not by abstract forces, but by people who plot their own course. Consequently, the past not only puts things into perspective; it can also galvanize our imaginations.

Even Karl Marx used it as the basis for his condemnation of the Speenhamland system in his magnum opus Das Kapital (1867) thirty years later. Poor relief, he said, was a tactic employers used to keep wages as low as possible by putting the onus on local government. Like his friend Friedrich Engels, Marx saw the old poor laws as a relic of a feudal past. Releasing the proletariat from the shackles of poverty required a revolution, not a basic income.

Far from helping the poor, it was this specter of the workhouse that enabled employers to keep wages so miserably low. Meanwhile, the myth of Speenhamland played a pivotal role in propagating the idea of a free, self-regulating market. According to two contemporary historians, it helped to “cover up the first major policy failure of the new science of political economy.”

No true free market

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. They’re being trained for it. 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.

years ago, before we had the Internet.11 Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. 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. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess. By contrast, a centuries-old tree doesn’t count until you chop it down and sell it as lumber.

Problem of externalities

That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems. “By

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. We live in a world where the going rule seems to be that the more vital your occupation (cleaning, nursing, teaching), the lower you rate in the GDP. As the Nobel laureate James Tobin said back in 1984, “We are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”

The idea that the GDP still serves as an accurate gauge of social welfare is one of the most widespread myths of our times.

The first person to argue that what matters is not the nature but the price of products was the economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924). By Marshall’s measure, a Paris Hilton movie, an hour of Jersey Shore, and a Bud Light Lime can all boost a country’s wealth, as long as they carry a price tag.

Beginning of change in economic valuation

Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP. His initial calculations caused a flurry of excitement and the report he presented to Congress became a national bestseller (itself adding to the GDP, one 20-cent copy at a time). Soon, you couldn’t switch on the radio without hearing about “national income” this or “the economy” that.

To 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. In spite of this methodology, the GDP is never presented as anything less than hard science, whose fractional vacillations can make the difference between reelection and political annihilation. Yet this apparent precision is an illusion. The GDP is not a clearly defined object just waiting around to be “measured.” To measure GDP is to seek to measure an idea. A great idea, admittedly. There’s no denying that GDP came in very handy during wartime, when the enemy was at the gates and a country’s very existence hinged on production, on churning out as many tanks, planes, bombs, and grenades as possible. During wartime, it’s perfectly reasonable to borrow from the future. During wartime, it makes sense to pollute the environment and go into debt. It can even be preferable to neglect your family, put your children to work on a production line, sacrifice your free time, and forget everything that makes life worth living. Indeed, during wartime, there’s no metric quite as useful as the GDP.

Thee all-consuming need to win a war became mistaken foor an all-consuming need to produce.

Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state. 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. “The gross national product… measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile,” said Robert Kennedy.25

Two candidates are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which also incorporate pollution, crime, inequality, and volunteer work in their equations.

Put another way: 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.

Leave efficiency to machines; man is for art

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

And efficienncy connotates a goal

After all, the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and infirm and to organize education on a more personal scale.

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.

Who is the real parasite?

You may brush this aside with the argument that such “externalities” can’t simply be quantified because they involve too many subjective assumptions, but that’s precisely the point. “Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education”–“Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care”–“We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university”–“We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television”–“The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…”

The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”31 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 victory of the unimaginative man

Simon Kuznets warned us about this eight years ago. “The welfare of a nation can… scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” he reported to Congress. “Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is contingent upon oversimplification.”32 The inventor of GDP cautioned against including in its calculation expenditure for the military, advertising, and the financial sector,33 but his advice fell on deaf ears. After World War II, 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.”

Progress without vision

“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”

Before long, machines would be doing all the work. This would free up “abundant scope for recreation,” enthused an English professor, “by immersion in the imaginative life, in art, drama, dance, and a hundred other ways of transcending the constraints of daily life.”9

the feminist revolution.

Feminist revolution flooded market labor surplus without adjusting for removal of non-GDP-valued activities.

With women storming the labor market, men should have started working less (and cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the family more).

More leisure is a wonderful ideal, but it’s simply too expensive. If we were all to work less, our standard of living would collapse and the welfare state would crumble. But would it?

"our standard of living" i.e. things we don't need/curated consumption

Heath decided on a radical course of action. On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three-day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days’ electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. 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 What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand. In the 1980s, Apple employees sported T-shirts that read, “Working 90 hours a week and loving it!” Later, productivity experts calculated that if they had worked half the hours then the world might have enjoyed the groundbreaking Macintosh computer a year earlier.

Culture of overwork martyrdom

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

My 5-hr workday

Nowadays, excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Moaning about too much work is often just a veiled attempt to come across as important and interesting.

By 2030, Keynes predicted, economists would play only a minor role, “on a level with dentists.” But this dream now seems farther off than ever. Economists dominate the arenas of media and politics.

Our answer: Yes, very much, please. We’re even willing to trade in precious purchasing power for more free time.

But things that used to be categorized as leisure (art, sports, science, care, philanthropy) are now classed as work.

What defines work?

Working less provides the bandwidth for other things that are also important to us, like family, community involvement, and recreation.

Reading about elected officials

Then, we can curb the workweek step by step, trading in money for time, investing more money in education, and developing a more flexible retirement system and good provisions for paternity leave and childcare.

Instead of more money to buy things we don't need, we have more time to make better, less stressed, decisions.