Utopia for realists: Rethinking work, inequality and the future
Key topics:
Global inequality and 'passport privilege' shaping life opportunities
Universal basic income, shorter workweeks, and 'bullshit jobs' critique
Optimism about future society vs risks including AI and global change
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By Eugene Yiga
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Even though Charles Dickens wrote these words over 160 years ago, they seem particularly relevant when we look at the world today. And given how much the world has battled with war, famine, disease, and death over the last few years, many wonder whether this is the end of the world as we know it. But historian Rutger Bregman thinks otherwise. Originally published in 2014 and initially written as a series of articles for the Dutch journal De Correspondent, his book “Utopia for Realists” serves as a rallying cry for a transformative overhaul of our approach to work, life, and societal structures.
One of the main arguments is that even though we’ve made great progress when it comes to combating global issues like extreme poverty, we’re nowhere near where we should be based on our abilities. Bregman has referred to this as “global apartheid”, where simply having a certain passport already determines the majority of your income. This makes your passport the most valuable possession you have in the world, at least if you’re lucky enough to be born into or otherwise live in the right country. For many people it allows them the freedom to travel the globe. But for other people it leaves them stuck.
This idea of inequality is one of the core themes of Bregman’s work and fiery public discourses, from his TED Talk to his appearance on The Daily Show to his viral comments at the World Economic Forum. It also leads to his argument that one of the most efficient ways to build trust and to eradicate poverty is to introduce a universal basic income that everyone receives.
The book supports its ideas with multiple academic studies and anecdotal evidence, including Richard Nixon’s 1968 plan for a basic income for Americans; the Mincome project in the Canadian city of Dauphin, Manitoba, which “eliminated poverty” and reduced hospitalisation rates; and the perceived success of the Schengen Agreement as part of the argument that we “open borders worldwide with the free movement of citizens between all states”.
Of course there are counterarguments too. Fellow historian and author Yuval Noah Harari has said that his main issue with universal basic income is the “universal” part of it. Most people who talk seriously about universal basic income actually mean national basic income. They have this idea that there will be a huge revolution in automation, with big corporations in California making lots of money, people in other parts of the country losing their jobs, and the government stepping in to take taxes from the former to give universal basic income to the latter. This sounds great except that the biggest problems wouldn’t be in the US. Instead, they’d be in countries like El Salvador or Pakistan.
“I don’t see any political scenario, at least not in the world that we live in now, of any US government, even a Democrat government, taking taxes from California and using it to give people income in Pakistan,” Harari has said. “It’s not going to happen. This is why I’m worried when people talk about it because I think that they’re only thinking about the local problem in their own country. The big problems will be on the global level. Countries like the US are going to become even richer and more powerful thanks to the new technologies. So they will be able, either with universal basic income or by retraining the workforce or in other ways, to take care of the citizens. The big problem is who is going to take care of all the people who lose their jobs and lose their futures in El Salvador or in Pakistan. Universal basic income doesn’t address this question.” Still, Bregman makes an argument for how universal income could allow for 15-hour workweeks, something economist John Maynard Keynes predicted would be the case for us right about now when he said so almost 100 years ago. Bregman takes this further by talking about how this would also allow us to do away with the concept of “bullshit jobs”, which even those people doing them realise add no value to themselves or society at large.
He expands on this with a captivating case study of two strikes: one in February 1968 by sanitation workers in New York and another in May 1970 by bank employees in Ireland. Given how much we’ve learned about essential workers in the pandemic, there are no surprises as to which strike ended first and who, based on the response, is doing work that matters. Ultimately, the book is a compelling look at what’s possible, even though sceptics might read it and feel that perhaps he’s being a bit naïve as to whether or not all this can actually work in practice. But Bregman maintains that our current sense of despair is nothing new.
“It’s interesting that most people in human history thought they were living at the end,” he says. “They thought that society could collapse at any moment, or there would be some kind of apocalypse – some people would go to heaven and some would go to hell. But now, for probably the first time in human history, we could actually be at the beginning of something that is really, really big.”
Of course, one could argue that this is perhaps also the most dangerous century in all of human history, not so much because of what’s happened, but because of what could come thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, which Bregman sees as perhaps one of the most dangerous technologies on the horizon. Still, he believes that there’s hope. “If you look at the metaphor that maybe humans are just in their teenage years, or maybe we’re toddlers, or maybe we’re babies who just came out of the womb blinking,” he muses. “That could be true. The future could be vast if we play our cards right.”
