“Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There” by Rutger Bregman
This book is an interesting deep dive on the many utopian ideas from the past, and the impressive theories behind them. It is an analysis about what actually worked and what were utter disasters.
The book begins by showing how things were truly dark and gloomy in the past, where even the poorest today live better than those living during the Dutch Golden Age. As the author, Rutger Bregman, remarks “In the country where I live, the Netherlands, a homeless person receiving public assistance today has more to spend than the average Dutch person in 1950, and four times more than people in Holland’s glorious Golden Age, when the country still ruled the seven seas.”
That’s the everyday reality for common people even during one of the most prosperous eras in history.
“But in the last 200 years, all of that has changed”, Bregman continues, where “In just a fraction of the time that our species has clocked on this planet, billions of us are suddenly rich, well nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and occasionally even beautiful. Where 84% of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10%.”
Indeed, despite all the problems, things are actually getting much better for humanity as a whole today compared with any point in history. And it’s not only in the number of people coming out of extreme poverty but also reflected in explosive growth in both population and prosperity, especially in the past 2 centuries. Today, per capita income is 10 times what it was in 1850, while the global economy is now 250 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, “when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.”
And it doesn’t stop in prosperity. In terms of health the statistics have shown massive improvements. For instance, 50 years ago 1 in 5 children died before the age of 50, but today the number improved to 1 in 20 children. History’s number 1 mass-murderer (the smallpox) has also been completely wiped out, while Polio has nearly disappear where it claims 99% fewer victims in 2013 than in 1988. And today more and more children are now geting immunized against common diseases.
And then we have education. In 1962 as many as 41% of children didn’t go to school, while the figure is only 10% today. In most countries, the average IQ has risen for 3 to 5 points every 10 years, mainly thanks to improved nutrition and education. Perhaps this is also why we’ve become so much more civilized, with the past 1 decade rated as relatively the most peaceful throughout history.
Hence, us humans have really evolved a lot for the better. It shows that humanity can indeed progress into something much closer to an ideal state, and that is thanks to our effort to realize an utopian dream.
Because, many utopia dreams are rooted from the very thing that we are lacking in our respective societies. As Bregman explains, “Simple desires beget simple utopias. If you’re hungry, you dream of a lavish banquet. If you’re cold, you dream of a toasty fire. Faced with mounting infirmities, you dream of eternal youth. All of these desires are reflected in the old utopias, conceived when life was still nasty, brutish, and short.”
Of course, not all utopian dreams have nobel goals. If we look at the dark chapters of history we can also find horrifying forms of utopianism, such as fascism, communism, Nazism, just as every religion has produced fanatical sects with a utopian dream.
There is also the case of overshooting or failure to keep up, which turn utopian dream into dystopian. As Bregman remarks, “It’s a vicious circle. Never before have so many young adults been seeing a psychiatrist. Never before have there been so many early career burnouts. And we’re popping antidepressants like never before. Time and again, we blame collective problems like unemployment, dissatisfaction, and depression on the individual. If success is a choice, then so is failure. Lost your job? You should have worked harder. Sick? You must not be leading a healthy lifestyle. Unhappy? Take a pill.”
So, what’s the solution? Quite a lot of people are dismissing utopian dream as a road to more disaster than good, and opt to abandoning it altogether. Just like blaming the entire religion for the conduct of few minority extremists. But Bregman has a different idea.
This is what the book is ultimately all about, Bregman’s own argument for utopia, based on his top notch understanding of economics and the wealth of examples from history. His utopia is based on 4 main premises: Universal basic income, shorter work week, open borders, and redefining progress.
Universal basic income
In universal basic income Bregman argues that the solution to many people’s money problem is to directly give them money. And he has the statistics to prove why it 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. “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.””
Now, I know what you’re thinking, wouldn’t they just use up the money for drugs, or gambling, all that leisures, etc and burn all the money? Bregman illustrate his points using several real-life cases across the world, from an experiment with 13 homeless people in London to villagers in Kenya and Uganda, all of whom were given money and can turn their life around for the better.
As Bregman explains, “The researchers summed up these programs’ benefits: (1) households put the money to good use, (2) poverty declines, (3) there can be diverse long-term benefits for income, health, and tax revenues, and (4) the programs cost less than the alternatives.” The alternatives in the case of 13 homeless people is a bill estimated £400,000 ($650,000) a year to fund police expenses, court costs, and social services due to their presence, and compare it with the cost of giving them all £3000 free money for them to jump-start their lives: which amounted to £50,000 a year (including the social worker wages).
After all, “Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) promises that, one day, it will come. A universal basic income. And not merely for a few years, or in developing countries alone, or only for the poor, but just what it says on the box: free money for everyone. Not as a favor, but as a right. Call it the “capitalist road to communism.””
That last sentence is probably the most amusing take for me in this book, the realization that “communism” is not necessarily the anti-thesis of capitalism, but – as Karl Marx have mentioned before – communism is the next stage of capitalism, although Marx argued that communism rise after capitalism failed. But this book has a different take, where it is only after capitalism has succeeded, when all possible wealth have been generated, that we get to distribute all the wealth equally to the community.
As Bergman elaborate, “Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a fantastic engine for prosperity. “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto. 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. It’s what capitalism ought to have been striving for all along. See it as a dividend on progress, made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of past generations.”
Shorter work week
In shorter work week, Bregman took the idea of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who predicted that technological advances would someday drastically reduce work hours. And Bregman then advocates for redistributing work so that we can increase leisure time, health, and well being. In short: A 15-hour work week.
Bregman argues the benefit of shorter work week includes: reduced stress, cutting CO2 emission, lesser workplace accidents, more employment as one job role can be shared with 2 or more people on a shift, emancipation of women (as proven in countries like Sweden), distributing work across generations and accommodating older population that still need to work, and even reducing inequality (as Bregman points out, “the countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest work-weeks. While the poor are working longer and longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise”).
Open border
Next Bregman advocates an open border, for a much greater freedom of movement for people across countries, which would “boost wealth by much more – one thousand times more. In numbers: $65,000,000,000,000. In words: sixty-five trillion dollars.” In the book he illustrate how the world was so much more open in the past (before the two world wars) and he cited studies and economic modelling on how they were beneficial.
The core argument for this evolves on the thesis that workers in poor countries are often more productive when they move to relatively richer countries. Not because they are smarter, but because the new environment in the rich country allows them to contribute better with better infrastructure, better institutions, better tools, etc.
For example, a doctor earns much less of what they’d make in a poor country compared to if they work in the US or UK despite doing the same job. By moving to a richer country, the doctor can perform the same service but earn more money that would boost total productivity.
Because, despite the common misconceptions with the anti-immigration stances, in the long run immigration doesn’t destroy jobs or depress wages, because immigrants often take jobs that locals don’t want, or start businesses, and contribute with taxes.
After all, as Bregman argues, borders are “apartheid on a global scale”, where “the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.” Hence, by dismantling borders there will be an increased chance of rising global equality.
Redefining progress
Bregman also argues to change our narrow focus using GDP as a measure of societal success. And instead, we should measure progress using more matrix such as well-being, happiness and purpose, not just through economic output.
My favourite take from this argument is how he shows that disasters are good for GDP growth, since there are problems to solve that will need investment and mobility, etc, that can stimulate the economy. As Bregman explains, “Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems.”
Moreover, “Recently, the International Monetary Fund published a report which revealed that too much inequality even inhibits economic growth.” But at the same time “Society can’t function without some degree of inequality. There still need to be incentives to work, to endeavor, and to excel, and money is a very effective stimulus.”
I mean, this is not how we want to measure and incentivise success, right?
Eradicating poverty
All of these proposals for changes are ultimate done first and foremost to eradicate poverty. It has been a subject as old as society from ancient Egypt, Babylon, and India; to the likes of contemporary economists such as Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. But Bregman has a completely different angle to it.
As the book shows, the problem with poverty is not laziness or the relative lack of opportunity, but mental bandwidth. Poor people simply have more worries to think about and thus they are using up their mental capacity to perform a single task, producing worst results compared with those who have a little bit more financial security.
The example of the people in Vilupuram and Tiruvannamalai in rural India, are excellent. “Shafir found what he was looking for some 8,000 miles away in the districts of Vilupuram and Tiruvannamalai in rural India. The conditions were perfect; as it happened, the area’s sugarcane farmers collect 60% of their annual income all at once right after the harvest. This means they are flush one part of the year and poor the other. So how did they do in the experiment? At the time when they were comparatively poor, they scored substantially worse on the cognitive tests, not because they had become dumber people somehow – they were still the same Indian sugarcane farmers, after all – but purely and simply because their mental bandwidth was compromised.”
Bregman explains it more. “Compare it to a new computer that’s running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors, and eventually it freezes – not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has to do too much at once. Poor people have an analogous problem. They’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.”
Indeed, if you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with hundreds problems in your mind and not be present while doing your job. Self control will feel like a challenge, you are easily distracted and pertubed, and for poor people this happens every day. As Bregman elaborates, “This is 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.”
A utopian dream
And so, Bregman proposes a universal basic income, a shorter work week, an open border, and the redefining of progress, in order for us to eradicate poverty and live in a more equal, prosperous, and happy world. Could it actually happen? I highly doubt it.
Not because of the infeasibility of the idea, since in a perfect world Bregman’s realistic proposal can be very much implemented. But because of the irrational nature of humans, especially those that have climbed the ladder to the top.
As Bregman illustrates it, “A person living at the poverty line in the U.S. belongs to the richest 14% of the world population; someone earning a median wage belongs to the richest 4%. At the very top, the comparisons get even more skewed. In 2009, as the credit crunch was gathering momentum, the employee bonuses paid out by investment bank Goldman Sachs were equal to the combined earnings of the world’s 224 million poorest people. And just eight people – the richest people on Earth – own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.”
In other words, in a world filled with ego and greed, a redistribution of income for all to share is the last thing that people at the top what. And why would they? Giving up a large chunk of your hard-earned money to people who are presumably lazy and undeserved? That is, until we find out that the richest of the rich don’t pay taxes and instead hide their stash in some tax havens as well as gaining political powers from donations to secure more access to more wealth, while the poor are taxed even higher. But that’s a topic for another book.
For this book, the proposal presented by Bregman can instead serve as an ideal goal for us to pursue, a some kind of utopia dream that can make the world a better place if we can progress towards it, slowly, and cautiously.
Because, as mentioned above, humanity have progressed so rapidly in the past couple of centuries. So there’s still hope. As Bregman remarks, “The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: Things could be different. The way our world is organized is not the result of some axiomatic evolution. Our current status quo could just as easily be the result of the trivial yet critical twists and turns of history.”
THE CHAOS THEORY 