Utopia for Realists

05 Jan, 2024

My review of Utopia for Realists, from Rutger Bregman.

A no-BS guide to make socialist dreams come true. Great companion to Humankind, which is more historical and less practical.

TL;DR

• Give people free money, without asking anything in return (a dividend on progress).
• Especially to the poor (it pays for itself).
• Stop measuring "wealth" and start measuring what makes life worthwhile.
• Make people work less, and on worthwhile issues (VS bullshit jobs).
• Open borders.
• Dream big.

Notes

The Land of Plenty

• Our 21st century’s society is literally the Land of Plenty that people once dreamed of in the Middle Ages: food available 24/7, long life spans, entertainment… yet it was an utopia for most of the time we’ve been here.
• It’s time to switch our perspective and find other utopias in order to keep progressing and being happy (which doesn’t necessarily implies being richer).

Free money (basic income)

• Studies the world over have shown that it’s more efficient to just handle cash to poor people, no strings attached (VS the cost of bureaucracy and setting up complex programs).
• "Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots". -- Joseph Hanlon
• The (political) right is afraid that people will stop working, while the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices. In reality people are being responsible and the outcomes vastly benefit society as a whole (more education, less crime and violence, etc).
• The welfare state has become a bureaucratic slump, where the poor stay trapped in bad opportunities.

"See [basic income] as a dividend on progress, made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of past generations. […] This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it".

The end of poverty

• Poor people do dumb things because it’s mentally exhausting to be poor (and live by the “scarcity mentality”): strong link between financial stress and chronic psychological diseases.
• How much dumber does poverty make you? Losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism (!).
• Fighting poverty pays for itself: the hidden costs of poverty are way bigger than what it costs to provide basic shelter and food.
• Utah gave everyone a roof, which costs $11k / year / person VS $17k/y for homeless person (social services, police, courts…).
• Netherlands tried the same: "every euro invested in fighting and preventing homelessness enjoys double or triple returns in savings on social services, police, and court costs."

The Bizarre Tale of President Nixon and His Basic Income Bill

• In 1969, Richard Nixon could have proposed a bill in favour of universal income ($ 1,600 a year for each family, ~$10k of today). But one of his advisors was opposed to it and told him about Speenhamland’s Poor Law.
• Speenhamland’s Poor Law (1795, England) was one of the earliest example of basic income. It managed effectively to reduce poverty but due to political and religious concerns (feed the poor and they’ll become even more lazy and lustful, cf Malthus & Ricardo) it has been cancelled, and labelled as a failure for 150 years.

What makes life worthwhile?

• The more productive we become, the less efficient non-productivist sectors (healthcare, education) need to be (ie. we can spend more time on it, as we should).
• “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.” Kevin Kelly

"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."

A 15 hour workweek

• A shorter workweek has been predicted since Benjamin Franklin in the 18th (and Marx after him). Even Keynes considered that “leisure” would be the greatest challenge of the 21st century.
• Ford discovered that a shorter workweek (and higher wages) increased productivity. Until the 1980’s, the US passed laws to keep lowering the work hours.
• But with the economic crisis, it all changed. “Time is money. Economic growth can yield either more leisure time or more consumption. From 1850 to 1980 we got both but then, it is mostly consumption that increased.” We cannot afford our leisure time anymore, because it would mean less consumption.
• Or can’t we? The benefits of shorter workweeks have been demonstrated since the beginning of the century with Ford and Kellogs. Moreover, it also allows less stress, less pollution, less accident, less unemployment, more emancipation of women, and more seniors working, and less inequalities.
• And what would we do if we had free time? Watching TV? Not quite: countries where people work the most (the US, Japan, Turkey) are also the ones where people binge watch the most to numb ourselves.

It doesn’t pay to be a banker

• Today’s salaries are uncorrelated with the value brought to society: bullshit jobs -or even worse, value-destructing jobs such as high-frequency trader- pay a lot more than useful jobs (garbage collectors, nurses, teachers…)
• It doesn’t mean than high-payroll jobs are not hard, neither hard to access: they are just useless for society.

• Taxes can help to restore the balance between bullshit and useful jobs. Eg. taxes on financial transactions.
• We have to ask ourselves what we want the future to look like: more time for friends or family? For volunteer work? For sports? That’s what we want to teach our children at school, not how to get a job in 2030.

“In a world that's getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there's more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there's also more room for bullshit. As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work, and more work, the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow.”

“For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60cts is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain”.

Race against the machine

• We’ve feared automation would destroy jobs since its beginning (cf. the Luddites, 1812). Historically, it created more jobs than the contrary (cf. Schumpeter), but for how much time?
• We massively invested in education to keep up with the machines, but now that they are exponentially potent and complex, how will we catch up?
• The problem with robots is that profit comes to the owners: we need to redistribute. Redistribute money (basic income), time (shorter workweek), taxation (on capital instead of labour), robots.

Open borders

• The western world spends $135bn /y on foreign development aid (≈ 50 times less than the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). But we have no idea if it works or not.
• Esther Duflo was the first one to introduce rigorous testing in foreign aid economics, which led to huge advancements (eg. Distributing mosquito nets for free is way more efficient than selling them; or microcredit is was less efficient than cash transfer).
• A simple solution to help the poor would be to open borders for people (actually before the World Wars no one needed visas). It would create a $65 trillion opportunity (source: World Bank).
• When we think about it, your place of birth is the modern apartheid. Your chances in life depend on that more than anything else. But you can’t do anything about it. It’s just unfair.
• The biggest fallacies against the idea have been debunked. A diverse society leads to less violence, more wealth for everyone , and immigrants are not lazier or not prone to undermine social cohesion.

"Even just cracking the door would help. If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world would have $305 bn more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank. That’s x3 the total of all development aid."

How ideas change the world

• Are novel ideas useless? Certainly not. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. "Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come".

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure," Hayek wrote. "What we lack is a liberal Utopia"

Epilogue

• It looks like the left (the “underdog socialists”) abandoned both their dreams and reason. They lack utopia, and they only justify their politics with emotional answers instead of sharing the rational benefits.

“Their biggest problem is that they are dull. They’ve got no story to tell, nor even any language to convey in”.

“If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible.”

Quotes

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.

-- Eduardo Galeano

The goal of the future is full unemployment so we can play.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

-- Oscar Wilde

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

-- Bertrand Russel

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

-- Oscar Wilde