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Joel Richard asked this question about Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek:
Has any economists read this book? I'd like to hear your thoughts because from the title this things seems like garbage.
Frank Lee Kamyar malzoom and Bert Cattoor are correct! There's no Science or solid research to back up the theories in the book.

The so-called evidence quoted b…moreKamyar malzoom and Bert Cattoor are correct! There's no Science or solid research to back up the theories in the book.

The so-called evidence quoted by Rutger Bregman is either anecdotal, selective (cherry-picked) or based on spurious statistics for the most part. Some examples:

1) Bregman claims the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%. There's a major problem with this argument: while taxes did increase following the Great Depression and WW2, the Total Federal Revenue from taxes (as % of GDP) did not change much. It has stayed between 16-20%, with an average of 17.3% for the past 70 years (when the top tax-rate has seen levels such around 80%, 90%, 70%, 50%, 40%, etc)
Chart:
https://taxprof.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8...

2) Bregman also claims he's disproving the "fallacy" that cheap immigrant labor forces wages down. This a very complex topic (with hundreds of studies reaching contradicting results depending on methodology, sample-sizes, the time-windows examined, the geographical regions analyzed, etc). In statistics, a good (though not perfect) practice (in such cases) is to look for peer-reviewed meta-studies that aggregate hundreds of studies. Bregman only cherry picks 2 old studies: one covering a very short time-span in EU in the 1990s and another for US. The US study is based on the work of Douglas S. Massey (Princeton University/2007 "Understanding America’s Immigration Crisis" - which covers US immigration since 1970s, with more focus on 1980s and 1990s) but it's conclusions don't quite support Bregman's claims that immigration has virtually no effect on wages.

US Wages have been going up, 1948-1972, and virtually stopped growing between 1973-2013 (even experiencing a negative trend from late 1970s to the 2nd half of the 1990s).
Chart:
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/me...

According to Massey's paper:
"Among documented migrants,, the post-IRCA decline was much more serious. As with illegal migrants, those with documents experienced declining wages before the implementation of IRCA, albeit with more fluctuation. Over the entire six-year period from 1980 to 1986, the wages of legal immigrants fell from $12.00 to $11.00 per hour, a drop of 16.7 cents per year. After 1986, however, the rate of decline accelerated quite markedly to 38 cents per year, going from $11.00 per hour to $7.57 by 1995, a 31% erosion in just nine years.

After 1995, the decline in migrant wages bottomed out, and they began to rise once again for those with and without documents, reflecting the tight labor markets produced by the sustained economic boom of the 1990s, but they never recovered the ground lost earlier, and the reduced gap between documented and undocumented migrants persisted. The wages of those legally entitled to work in the United States had been permanently reduced." During the same time, the wages of most Americans workers have been mostly flat (when adjusted with inflation) for decades as well.

3) Even the UBI/Guaranteed-income experiments Rutger kept mentioning, some of which were still ongoing at the time the book was written/published, have failed miserably in recent times;
e.g.:
- the Guaranteed Income Experiment in Ontario/Canada (which Ontario's Government has pulled the plug on, in July-2018)
- Finland's two-year Basic Income trial which was stopped prematurely, in early 2019, after the Government had realized that the program has failed to combat unemployment (and made people report better well-being but at the cost of soaring unemployment in the general population).

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Utopia for Realists
by Rutger Bregman (Goodreads Author)
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