Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

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