Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

Studies from all over the world offer proof positive: Free money works. Already, research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality.13 “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.”

“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.”19

The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need.

“[The] declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home,” noted the Seattle experiment’s concluding report. For example, one mother who had dropped out of high school worked less in order to earn a degree in psychology and get a job as a researcher. Another woman took acting classes; her husband began composing music. “We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists,” she told the researchers.36 Among youth included in the experiment, almost all the hours not spent on paid work went into more education. Among the New Jersey subjects, the rate of high-school graduations rose 30%.37

Not until 1978 was the plan for a basic income shelved once and for all,

fatal discovery

One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in healt...

Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no c...

Certainly, some people may opt to work less, but then that’s precisely the point. A handful of artists and writers (“all those whom society despises while they are alive and honors when they are dead”–Bertrand Russell) might actually stop doing paid work altogether.

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people actually want to work, whether they need to or not.54 In fact, not having a job makes us deeply unhappy.55

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. Since basic income is unconditional, and will not be taken away or reduced in th...

“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.”

Yet it’s precisely 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.

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.

Despite all this, the drawbacks of a “scarcity mentality” are greater than the benefits. Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow.

how scarcity–whether of time or of money–leads to unwise decisions. There’s a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can’t take a break from poverty.

Take bullying. Countries with big disparities in wealth also have more bullying behavior, because there are bigger status differences.

“Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”26

mercantilism”–the notion that one man’s loss is another man’s gain. Early modern economists believed that countries could prosper only at other countries’ expense; it was all a matter of keeping exports high.

If you were to ask a mercantilist for his top tip, it would be lower wages–the lower the better. Cheap labor hones your competitive edge and therefore boosts exports.

the surest Wealth consists in a Multitude of laborious Poor.”

“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood that poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.

Giving away free housing, it turned out, was actually a windfall for the state budget. State economists calculated that a drifter living on the street cost the government $16,670 a year (for social services, police, courts, etc.). An apartment plus professional counseling, by contrast, cost a modest $11,000.30

The numbers are clear. Today, Utah is on course to eliminate chronic homelessness entirely, making it the first state in the U.S. to successfully address this problem. All while saving a fortune.