## Metadata - Author: [[Rutger Bregman]] - Full Title: Utopia for Realists - Category: #books ## Highlights - Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.26 If a political party or a religious sect had even a fraction of the influence that the advertising industry has on us and our children, we’d be up in arms. But because it’s the market, we remain “neutral.” ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=211)) - the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms. We go to a doctor when we’re sick, a therapist when we’re sad, a dietitian when we’re overweight, prison when we’re convicted, and a job coach when we’re out of work. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=217)) - the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand. ([Location 222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=222)) - Twenge also discovered that we have all become a lot more fearful over the last decades. Comparing 269 studies conducted between 1952 and 1993, she concluded that the average child living in early 1990s North America was more anxious than psychiatric patients in the early 1950s. ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=233)) - “WELFARE PLAN PASSES HOUSE… A BATTLE WON IN CRUSADE FOR REFORM,” headlined the New York Times on April 16, 1970. With 243 votes for and 155 against, President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was approved by an overwhelming majority. Most pundits expected the plan to pass the Senate, too, with a membership even more progressive than that of the House of Representatives. But in the Senate Finance Committee, doubts reared up. “This bill represents the most extensive, expensive, and expansive welfare legislation ever handled,” one Republican senator said.43 Most vehemently opposed, however, were the Democrats. They felt the FAP didn’t go far enough, and pushed for an even higher basic income.44 After months of being batted back and forth between the Senate and the White House, the bill was finally canned. In the following year, Nixon presented a slightly tweaked proposal to Congress. Once again, the bill was accepted by the House, now as part of a larger package of reforms. This time, 288 voted in favor, 132 against. In his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon considered his plan to “place a floor under the income of every family with children in America” the most important item of legislation on his agenda.45 ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=453)) - The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned economist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. ([Location 474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=474)) - The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “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.”56 A basic income system would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever. ([Location 507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=507)) - So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. 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. Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=532)) - well into the eighteenth century, poverty was just another fact of life. “The poor are like the shadows in a painting: they provide the necessary contrast,” wrote the French physician Philippe Hecquet (1661–1737). According to the English writer Arthur Young (1741–1820), “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”26 Historians refer to this rationale as “mercantilism”–the notion that one man’s loss is another man’s gain. ([Location 719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=719)) - “Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,” said the British essayist Samuel Johnson in 1782. ([Location 731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=731)) - 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. ([Location 1179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1179)) - In our race against the machine, it’s only logical that we’ll continue to spend less on products that can be easily made more efficiently and more on labor-intensive services and amenities such as art, healthcare, education, and safety. It’s no accident that countries that score high on well-being, like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, have a large public sector. Their governments subsidize the domains where productivity can’t be leveraged. Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor’s checkups can’t simply be made “more efficient.”29 The natural consequence is that the government is gobbling up a growing share of the economic pie. First noted by the economist William Baumol in the 1960s, this phenomenon, now known as “Baumol’s cost disease,” basically says that prices in labor-intensive sectors such as healthcare and education increase faster than prices in sectors where most of the work can be more extensively automated. ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1218)) - the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and infirm and to organize education on a more personal scale. Which is great, right? According to Baumol, the main impediment to allocating our resources toward such noble ends is “the illusion that we cannot afford them.” ([Location 1226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1226)) - When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease. ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1229)) - To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of the costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1233)) - The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”31 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia. ([Location 1243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1243)) - The GDP was contrived in a period of deep crisis and provided an answer to the great challenges of the 1930s. As we face our own crises of unemployment, depression, and climate change, we, too, will have to search for a new figure. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1250)) - Behind every statistic is a certain set of assumptions and prejudices. What’s more, those figures–and their assumptions–guide our actions. That’s true of GDP but equally true of the Human Development and Happy Planet indices. And it’s precisely because we need to change our actions that we need new figures to guide us. Simon Kuznets warned us about this eight years ago. “The welfare of a nation can… scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” he reported to Congress. “Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is contingent upon oversimplification.”32 The inventor of GDP cautioned against including in its calculation expenditure for the military, advertising, and the financial sector,33 but his advice fell on deaf ears. After World War II, Kuznets grew increasingly concerned about the monster he had created. “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth,” he wrote in 1962, “between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.” ([Location 1254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1254)) - A worldwide shift to a shorter workweek could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half.39 Countries with a shorter workweek have a smaller ecological footprint.40 Consuming less starts with working less–or, better yet, with consuming our prosperity in the form of leisure. ([Location 1437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1437)) - According to Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an uncomfortable truth: Slavery is a prerequisite for civilization. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” ([Location 1951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1951)) - The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there’s only one choice left, and that’s redistribution. Massive redistribution. Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots. ([Location 1985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=1985)) - Three-quarters of all border walls and fences were erected after the year 2000. ([Location 2286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=2286)) - If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts–in shocks–then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions–through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation–is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in. ([Location 2387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=2387)) - The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made. ([Location 2425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=2425)) - When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism. Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything? ([Location 2487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=2487)) - Sadly, the underdog socialist has forgotten that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress. By that I don’t mean a narrative that only excites a few hipsters who get their kicks philosophizing about “post-capitalism” or “intersectionality” after reading some long-winded tome. The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes simple matters dizzyingly complex. If you can’t explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent twelve-year-old, after all, it’s probably your own fault. What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people. ([Location 2557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MXDBTWM&location=2557))