Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.28

“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.”

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.

“The gross national product… measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile,” said Robert Kennedy.25

Now we’re living in a different era, but the story is the same: In overworked countries like Japan, Turkey, and, of course, the United States, people watch an absurd amount of television. Up to five hours a day in the U.S., which adds up to nine years over a lifetime. American children spend half again as much time in front of the TV as they do at school.56

The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there’s only one choice left, and that’s redistribution. Massive redistribution.

Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots.

The randomistas don’t think in terms of models. They don’t believe humans are rational actors. Instead, they assume we are quixotic creatures, sometimes foolish and sometimes astute, and by turns afraid, altruistic, and self-centered. And this approach appears to yield considerably better results.

In this era of “globalization,” only 3% of the world’s population lives outside their country of birth.

Today, the richest 8% earn half of all the world’s income,24 and the richest 1% own more than half of all wealth.25 The poorest billion people account for just 1% of all consumption; the richest billion, 72%.26

And just eight people–the richest people on Earth–own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.29

Humans didn’t evolve by staying in one place. Wanderlust is in our blood. Go back a few generations and almost everybody has an immigrant in the family tree.

How true and poetic.

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” So opens Leon Festinger’s account of these events in When Prophecy Fails, first published in 1956 and a seminal text in social psychology to this day. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1

Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.3

The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made.

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.

And this is how progress is made.

If Ivy League grads once went on to jobs in science, public service, and education, these days they’re far more likely to opt for banking, law, or ad proliferators like Google and Facebook. Stop for a moment to ponder the billions of tax dollars being pumped into training society’s best brains, all so they can learn how to exploit other people as efficiently as possible, and it makes your head spin. Imagine how different things might be if our generation’s best and brightest were to double down on the greatest challenges of our times. Climate change, for example, and the aging population, and inequality… Now that would be real innovation.

A few years ago, Australian writer Bronnie Ware published a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, about patients she had tended during her nursing career.2 And guess what? No one said he or she would have liked to pay closer attention to coworkers’ PowerPoint presentations or to have brain-stormed a little more on disruptive co-creation in the network society. The biggest regret was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Number two: “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

These should be daily reminders for each and every one of us who sometimes gets caught in the wheel.