Utopia For Realists
Utopia For Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
We are in the 'Land of Plenty' with unprecedented wealth and opportunity but it looks bleak. We have lost a sense that things can be better.
Some of Bregman's ideas include: replacing gross domestic product as a measure of progress; rolling out universal basic income; implementing a fifteen-hour working week; and opening borders to mass migration.
Society, not the market or technology gets to decide what has value. We need to think about what we want the future to look like.
🎨 Impressions
This is a highly enjoyable, engaging read despite the topic being about the issues the world is facing and policy changes. Bregman suggests ways in which we can think more broadly about our lives and where they are heading and offers solutions, as suggestions for us to get there. It is easy to get stuck in our beliefs, this book challenges our views in really fundamental ways.
How I Discovered It
This book was mentioned in an interesting discussion with Paul Millerd and Oshan Jarrow, as a follow on from this I read the book.
Who Should Read It?
If you are interested in thinking broader about where the world is heading, and want an additional view on topics such as ending poverty and work this is the book. These are big ideas discussed succinctly and simply.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
A culture that encourages us to spend money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need, in order to impress people we can’t stand. Then we go and cry on a therapist shoulder. That’s the dystopia we live in today.
The real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.
The inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.
📒 Summary + Notes
A World Without Utopia
We have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business people of today should 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. Richard Fuller.
We live in the Land of Plenty. An American Philosopher in 1989 noted that life had been reduced to 'economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.' We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. All that is left is the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
But the far horizon is blank. The Land of Plenty is shrouded in fog. There is no dream to replace a new utopia because we can't imagine a world better than the one we have. In most wealthy countries, people believe that children will be worse off than their parents.
The real crisis is not that we don't have it good or even that we might be worse off later on. The crisis is that we can't come up with anything better.
Bregman wants to attempt to unlock the future. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.
We are told growing up that we can be anything we want, that we are special. But as soon as we are released into the big world of unlimited opportunities, more and more of us crash and burn. The world it turns out is cold, harsh and rife with competition and unemployment.
Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting our quality of life.
The Issue with GDP
The gross national product...measures everything...expect that which makes life worthwhile. Robert Kennedy
GDP overlooks a huge part of the picture: community service, clean air. It doesn't calculate our advances in knowledge; as smart phones and computers get faster and smarter they get cheaper so don't feature in the numbers.
Today the average African with a cell phone has access to more information than President Clinton did in the 1990's yet the information sectors share of the economy hasn't budged from 25 years ago before we had the internet.
One company makes lots of money by cutting corners and another is paid to clean it up. This improves GDP along with mental illness, obesity, pollution and crime. The more the better in terms of GDP.
Even politicians that fight over everything else always seem to agree on one thing: that GDP must grow. We have this idea that as long as things are growing: publication rates, audience shares, graduation rates; and that doctors are focused and efficient we think everything is doing fine.
The 'Economy' is really just an idea. GDP is presented as hard science but this apparent precision is an illusion. The GDP is not a clearly defined object just waiting around to be measured. To measure GDP is to seek to measure an idea.
We have become fixated on 'efficiency' and 'gains' as though society were nothing but one big production line. We are trying to turn the good life into a spreadsheet.
Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what. It is up to us to reconsider: What is growth? What is progress? And more fundamentally, what makes life truly worthwhile.
Leisure:
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilisation. Bertrand Russell.
Mankind will be confronted with its greatest challenge: what to do with a sea of spare time. In 1974 the US Department of Interior declared 'Leisure, thought to be by many the epitome of paradise, may well become the most perplexing problem of the future.'
Seventy years after the US passed the forty-hour work week into law, 75% of the labour force were putting in more than forty hour weeks.
As time is money, economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption. Even when real incomes have stayed the same and inequality exploded, the consumption craze has continued, but on credit.
In the 19th century, it was typical for wealthy people to flatly refuse to roll up their sleeves. Work was for peasants. The more someone worked, the poorer they were. Nowadays the opposite occurs. Excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Moaning about work is an attempt to come across as more important and interesting. Time to oneself is equated to as unemployment or laziness.
Things that used to be categorised as leisure (arts, science, sport, care, philanthropy) are now being classed as work.
Work, Work, Work
Work is the refuge for people who have nothing better to do. Oscar Wilde.
The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. Arthur Clarke.
As farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed. This created a shift to the service sector. This created a system in which an increasing number of people can earn money without contributing anything tangible to society.
As long we continue to obsess about work, even as useful activities are further automated or outsourced, the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. 37% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.
One on hand governments cut back on useful jobs in education, healthcare and infrastructure, resulting in unemployment. While on the other hand investing millions in the unemployment industry of training and surveillance whose effectiveness has long been disproven. The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality and innovation. All that really matters is profit.
We don't have to wait until gambling with others money is no longer profitable; until nurses and police agents earn a decent wage and until math wizzes once again dream of building colonies on Mars instead of starting their own hedge fund.
Society, not the market or technology gets to decide what has value. We need to free ourselves of the dogma that all work is meaningful. And get rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value.
Just as we adapted to the First Age Machine through a revolution in education and welfare, the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter work week and universal basic income. As the richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labour market will be at distribution prosperity.
Change:
The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones. John Keynes.
Ironically the neoliberals who believed so strongly in the power of ideas, have caged our political imagination. Nowadays there is a common sentiment that all meaningful change is slow, which is not necessarily true. Not all change has to be gradual. In fact historically ideological change occurs very quickly.
