Utopia For Realists — Book Review & Quotes

Review

What is your perfect world? If you were put in charge of the simulation — reality is just one big game of SIMS and your’e in charge — what does yours look like? The mental exercise of trying to answer the myriad of questions alone would make you a better person — “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 first time I heard about Rutger Bregman was when he roasted the billionaires in Davos about needing to pay their fair share of taxes.

His ideas in this book range from universal basic income to open borders to the 15-hour work week. Whether you agree or disagree with his ideas, what struck me is his passionate push to think bigger, more broadly, trying to solve problems. There is a generation of brilliant minds operating around the worst paradigms of solutions.

“‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,’ a former math whiz at Facebook lamented.”

— — — —

“It has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.”

There are countless alternative ways that life could have played out. The predictions of a shortened work week driven by automation and improved social services was supposed to drive us towards more leisure, not more productivity.

“As the writer Kevin Kelly says, ‘Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.’ Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.”

Unfortunately, our reality didn’t play out that way.

“In the 1980s, workweek reductions came to a grinding halt. Economic growth was translating not into more leisure, but into more stuff.”

Our lifestyle expands to fill our budget. Whether we’ve made for ourselves more money or time, we’ll find ways to spend it. When Bregman talks about the brilliant minds who are innovating around clicking on ads, repackaging the same old medicine, legally protecting unfair monopolies, he’s pointing out the weaknesses of our imagination. We worked hard, but all we could think to do after working so hard was to work harder.

“The inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.”

The life we live and the freedoms we enjoy only mean something if we strive to alleviate suffering, make things better.

“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?”

I don’t know the answer to every question, but this book encouraged me to strive to find answers to the critical questions to the problems we face.

Quotes From The Book

“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)

“Let’s start with a little history lesson: In the past, everything was worse. For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.”

“Welcome, in other words, to the Land of Plenty. To the good life, where almost everyone is rich, safe, and healthy. Where there’s only one thing we lack: a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Because, after all, you can’t really improve on paradise.”

“We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is ‘neither art nor philosophy,’ Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the ‘perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.’”

“But 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.”

“There is, however, another avenue of utopian thought, one that is all but forgotten. If the blueprint is a high-resolution photo, then this utopia is just a vague outline. It offers not solutions but guideposts. Instead of forcing us into a straight jacket, it inspires us to change. And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of good.”

“The expectations of what we as a society can achieve have been dramatically eroded, leaving us with the cold, hard truth that without utopia, all that remains is a technocracy. Politics has been watered down to problem management. Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate.”

“We see it in journalism, which portrays politics as a game in which the stakes are not ideals, but careers. We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. In fact, the twenty-first-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, as do our hospitals, schools, and TV networks. What counts is achieving targets. Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications — slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.”

“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. According to the World Health Organization, depression has even become the biggest health problem among teens and will be the number-one cause of illness worldwide by 2030.”

“In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement ‘I’m a very special person.’ Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. We all read the same bestsellers, watch the same blockbusters, and sport the same sneakers.”

“‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,’ a former math whiz at Facebook lamented.”

“‘It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.’” (Bertrand Russel)

“Poor people can’t handle money. This seems to be the prevailing sentiment, almost a truism. After all, if they knew how to manage money, how could they be poor in the first place? We assume that they must spend it on fast food and soda instead of on fresh fruit and books. So to ‘help,’ we’ve rigged up a myriad of ingenious assistance programs, with reams of paperwork, registration systems, and an army of inspectors, all revolving around the biblical principle that ‘those unwilling to work will not get to eat.’”

“Faye doesn’t give people fish, or even teach them to fish. He gives them cash, in the conviction that the real experts on what poor people need are the poor people themselves.”

“‘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.’”

“Back at the University of Manchester, 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. o why send over expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor? Especially when this also takes sticky civil service fingers out of the equation. Plus, free csh greases the wheels of the whole economy: People buy more, and that boosts employment and income.”

“Yet the ‘lazy poor people’ argument is trotted out time and again. The very persistence of this view has compelled scientists to investigate whether it’s true. Just a few years ago, a prestigious medical journal the Lancet summed up their findings: When the poor receive no-strings cash they actually tend to work harder.”

“[Professor] Forget’s most remarkable finding, though, was that hospitalizations decreased by as much as 8.5%. Considering the size of public spending on healthcare in the developed world, the financial implications were huge. Several years into the experiment, domestic violence was also down, as were mental-health complaints. Mincome had made the whole town healthier. Forget could even trace the impacts of receiving a basic income through to the next generation both in earnings and in health.”

“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.”

“A system that helps solely the poor only drives a deeper wedge between them and the rest of society. ‘A policy for the poor is a poor policy,’ observed Richard Titmuss, the great theoretician of the British welfare state.”

“Never before has the time been so ripe for the introduction of a universal, unconditional basic income. Look around. Greater flexibility in the workplace demands that we also create greater security. Globalization is eroding the wages of the middle class. The growing rift between those with and those without a college degree makes it essential to give the have-nots a leg-up. And the development of ever-smarter robots could cost even the haves their jobs.”

“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)

“In short, why do the poor make so many dumb decisions? Harsh? Perhaps, but take a look at the statistics: The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthfully. Offer money-management training and the poor are the last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire.”

“What if the poor aren’t actually able to help themselves? What if all the incentives, all the information and education are like water off a duck’s back? And what if all those well-meant nudges only make the situation worse?”

“People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.”

“Despite all this, the drawbacks of a ‘scarcity mentality’ are greater than the benefits. Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out the window. ‘Scarcity consumes you,’ Shafir explains. ‘You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.’”

“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.”

“A recent meta-analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of financial education came to a similar conclusion: Such education makes almost no difference at all. This is not to say no one learns anything — poor people can come out wiser, for sure. But it’s not enough. ‘It’s like teaching a person to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea,’ laments Professor Shafir.”

“Whether you look at the incidence of depression, burnout, drug abuse, high dropout rates, obesity, unhappy childhoods, low election turnout, or social and political distrust, the evidence points to the same culprit every time: inequality.”

“When inequality goes up, social mobility goes down. Frankly, there’s almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A. Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.”

“‘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. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood that poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”

“Giving away free housing, it turned out, was actually a windfall for the state budget [in Utah.] State economists calculated that a drifter living on the street cost the government $16,670 a year (for social services, police, courts, etc.) An apartment plus professional counseling, by contrast, cost a modest $11,000.”

“There are lots of problems on which politicians can fiercely disagree, but homelessness should not be one of them. It’s a problem that can be solved. What’s more, solving it will actually free up funds. If you’re poor, your main problem is no money. If you’re homeless, your main problem is no roof over your head. Speaking of which, in Europe, the number of vacant houses is double the number of homeless. In the U.S. there are five empty homes for each person without one.”

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)

“As one historian rightly notes, ‘Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.’”

“It’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever be able to shake off the dogma that if you want money, you have to work for it. That a president as recent and as conservative as Richard Nixon once sought to implement a basic income seems to have evaporated from the collective memory.”

“Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of ‘activating’ policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training. No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, to the unemployed, who haven’t developed their ‘employment skills’ or simply haven’t given it their best shot.”

“The current tangle of red tape keeps people trapped in poverty. It actually produces dependence. Whereas employees are expected to demonstrate their strengths, social services expects claimants to demonstrate their shortcomings; to prove over and over than an illness is sufficiently debilitating, that a depression is sufficiently bleak, and that chances of getting hired are sufficiently slim. Otherwise your benefits are cut. Forms, interviews, checks, appeals, assessments, consultations, and then still more forms — every application for assistance has its own debasing, money-guzzling protocol. ‘It tramples on privacy and self-respect in a way inconceivable to anyone outside the benefit system,’ says one British social services worker. ‘It creates a noxious fog of suspicion.’”

“The gross national product…measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile.” (Robert F. Kennedy)

“The Gross Domestic Product. So, what is it really? Well, that’s easy, you say: The GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power. To which Bastiat would respond: You’ve overlooked a huge part of the picture. Community service, clear air, free refills on the house — none of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.”

“The GDP also does a poor job of calculating advances in knowledge. Our computers, cameras, and phones are all smarter, speedier, and snazzier than ever, but also cheaper, and therefore they scarcely figure.”

“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. ‘By the standard of the GDP,’ says the writer Jonathan Rowe, ‘the worst families in America are those that actually function as families — that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture.’”

“‘If banking had been subtracted from the GDP, rather than added to it,’ the Financial Times recently reported, ‘it is plausible to speculate that the financial crisis would never have happened.”

“‘Economy’ isn’t really a thing, after all — it’s an idea.”

“To calculate the GDP, numerous data points have to be linked together and hundreds of wholly subjective choices made regarding what to count and what to ignore. IN spite of this methodology, the GDP is never presented as anything less than hard science, whose fractional vacillations can make the difference between reelection and political annihilation. Yet 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.”

“From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we’re all still fixated on ‘efficiency’ and ‘gains,’ as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it’s precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail.”

“John Stuart Mill once said: ‘Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’”

“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.”

“As the writer Kevin Kelly says, ‘Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.’ Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.”

“What we need is a ‘dashboard’ complete with an array of indicators to track the things that make life worthwhile — money and growth, obviously, but also community service, jobs, knowledge, social cohesion. And, of course, the scarcest good of all time: time.”

“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.” (Bertrand Russell)

“A dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and the mastermind behind the production line, Henry Ford had discovered that a shorter workweek actually increased productivity among his employees. Leisure time, he observed, was a ‘cold business fact.’ A well-rested worker was a more effective worker. And besides, an employee toiling at a factory from dawn till dusk, with no free time for road trips or joy rides, would never buy one of his cars. As Ford told a journalist, ‘It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”

“Keynes’ bold prediction had become a truism. In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report projected that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just fourteen hours with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed. Working would soon be reserved for the elite.” — Automation may force us there; I wonder what did these believers in the limited work week believe about universal basic income or how the non-workers would support themselves?

“In the 1980s, workweek reductions came to a grinding halt. Economic growth was translating not into more leisure, but into more stuff.”

“But that’s not all. Even in countries that have seen a reduction in the individual workweek, families have nevertheless become more pressed for time. Why? It all has to do with the most important development of the last decades: the feminist revolution.”

“‘My grandma didn’t have the vote, my mom didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have any time,’ as Dutch comedienne pithily summed it up.”

“At the same time, parenting has become a much more time-intensive job. Research suggests that across national boundaries, parents are dedicating substantially more time to their children. In the U.S., working mothers actually spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s.”

“What’s more, work and leisure are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle. A study conducted at the Harvard Business School has shown that, thanks to modern technology, managers and professionals in Europe, Asia, and North America now spend eighty to ninety hours per week ‘either working, or ‘monitoring’ work and remain accessible.’ And according to Korean research, the smartphone has the average employee working eleven more hours per week.”

“Most peasants didn’t work any harder than necessary for their living. ‘The tempo of life was slow,’ Schor writes. ‘Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.’ So where has all that time gone? It’s quite simple, really. Time is money. Economic growth can yield either more leisure or more consumption.”

“There are strong indications that in a modern knowledge economy, even forty hours a week is too much. Research suggest that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.”

“Consuming less starts with working less — or, better yet, with consuming our prosperity in the form of leisure.”

“Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender-equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work. Not until men do their fair share of cooking, cleaning, and other domestic labor will women be free to fully participate in the broader economy.”

“And paternity leave, in particular, is crucial: Men who spend a few weeks at home after the birth of a child devote more time to their wives, to their children, and to the kitchen stove than they would have otherwise. Plus, this effect lasts — are you ready for it? — for the rest of their lives.”

“Nowadays, excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Moaning about too much work is often just a veiled attempt to come across as important and interesting. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.”

“It’s time that women, the poor, and seniors got the chance to do more, not less, good work. Stable and meaningful work plays a crucial part in every life well-lived.”

“Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow. Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all. When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without.”

“Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around — creating next to nothing of tangible value — that net the best salaries. It’s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity — the teachers, the police officers, the nurses — are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?”

“Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, however. Making money without creating anything of value is anything but easy. It takes talent, ambition, and brains. And the banking world is brimming with clever minds. ‘The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier,’ explains the economist Roger Bootle. ‘This is a skill. But so is the ability to stand on tiptoe, balancing one leg, while holding a pot of tea above your head, without spillage.’ In other words, the fact that something is difficult does not automatically make it valuable.”

“David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.’ In Graeber’s analysis, innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless, jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. ‘Bullshit jobs,’ Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.”

“Almost anybody can collect trash, but a career in banking is reserved for a select few.”

“The number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow. Much like the number of managers in the developed world, which has grown over the last thirty years without making us a dime richer. On the contrary, studies show that countries with more managers are actually less productive and innovative. In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no ‘meaning and significance,’ and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission. Another recent poll revealed that as many as 17% of British workers think they have a bullshit job.”

“In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.”

“Maybe society is stuck in a comparable rut today, except this time at the very top of the pyramid. Maybe some of those people have had their vision clouded by all the zeros on their paychecks, the hefty bonuses, and the cushy retirement plans. Maybe a fat billfold triggers a similar false consciousness: the conviction that you’re producing something of great value because you earn so much.”

“For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5 — and often much more — is pumped back into the economy.”

“Though it may have bolstered the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, education has also been a source of new and tangible prosperity. If you were to draw up a list of the most influential professions, teacher would likely rank among the highest. This isn’t because teachers accrue rewards like money, power, or status, but because teaching shapes something much bigger — the course of human history.”

“If there’s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it’s in the classroom.”

“On the education conference circuit, an endless parade of trend watchers prophesy about the future and essential twenty-first-century skills, the buzzwords being ‘creative,’ ‘adaptable,’ and ‘flexible.’ The focus, invariably, is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On ‘problem-solving ability,’ but not which problems need solving. Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market — the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question. In 2030, there will likely be a high demand for savvy accountants untroubled by a conscience. If current trends hold, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland will become even bigger tax havens, enabling multinationals to dodge taxes even more effectively, leaving developing countries with an ever shorter end of the stick. If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential twenty-first-century skill. Not because the law or the market or technology demand it, but solely because that, apparently, is how we prefer to earn our money.”

“If we restructure education around our new ideals, the job market will happily tag along. Let’s imagine we were to incorporate more art, history, and philosophy into the school curriculum. You can bet there will be a lift in demand for artists, historians, and philosophers. It’s like the dream of 2030 that John Maynard Keynes had back in 1930. Increased prosperity — and the increased robotization of work — would finally enable us to ‘value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.’ The purpose of a shorter workweek is not so we can all sit around doing nothing, but so we can spend more time on the things that genuinely matter to us.”

“Let’s also git rid of the fallacy that a higher salary is automatically a reflection of societal value.”

“‘The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish,’ Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief wrote back in 1983, ‘in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.’”

“The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners. In his own day, Marshall observed a shrinking oligopoly on the production of grand pianos. With each new road that was paved and each new canal that was dug, the costs of transport dropped another notch, making it increasingly easy for piano builders to export their wares. With their marketing clout and economies of scale, the big producers quickly overran small local suppliers. And as the world contracted further, the minor league players were driven from the field.”

“From the small accountancy firms that are undercut by tax software to corner bookshops struggling to hold their own against online megastores — in one sector after another the giants have grown even as the world has shrunk.”

“By now it’s no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and techno-prophets who are apprehensive. Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of all those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next twenty. ‘The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame,’ a New York University professor notes. ‘But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.’”

“Over the course of the twentieth century, productivity growth and job growth ran more or less parallel. Man and machine marched along side by side. Now, as we step into a new century, the robots have suddenly picked up the pace. It began around the year 2000, with what two MIT economists called ‘the great decoupling.’ ‘It’s the great paradox of our era,’ said one. ‘Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs.’”

“Futurologist Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 computers will be just as intelligent as people. In 2045 they might even be a billion times smarter than all human brains put together. According to the techno-prophets, there simply is no limit to the exponential growth of machine computing power. Of course, Kurzweil is equal parts genius and mad. And it’s worth bearing in mind that computing power is not the same thing as intelligence.”

“Though the share of highly skilled and unskilled jobs has remained fairly stable, work for the average-skilled is on a decline. Slowly but surely, the bedrock of modern democracy — the middle class — is crumbling.”

“The British economist Guy Standing has predicted the emergence of a new, dangerous ‘precariat’ — a surging social class of people in low-wage, temporary jobs and with no political voice.”

“Their wages were plummeting and their jobs were disappearing like dust in the wind. ‘How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?’ wondered the late eighteenth-century clothworkers of Leeds. ‘Some say, Begin and learn some other business. Suppose we do; who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task; and when we have learned it, how do we know we shall be any better for all our pains; for…another machine may arise, which may take away that business also.’”

“On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” (Oscar Wilde)

“However, there’s something else that is equally vital to the future of our world, and that’s a mechanism for redistribution. We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners. For 200 years that system was the labor market, which ceaselessly churned out new jobs and, in so doing, distributed the fruits of progress. But for how much longer? What if the Luddites’ fears were premature, but ultimately prophetic? What if most of us are doomed, in the long run, to lose the race agains the machine? What can be done?”

“Preparing our own children for the new century will be considerably more difficult, however, not to mention expensive. All the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.”

“Anyone who wants to continue plucking the fruits of progress will have to come up with a more radical solution. Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.”

“The inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.”

“Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots. As far back as the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when everybody would benefit from intelligent machines that were ‘the property of all.’ Technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there’s no economic law that says everyone will benefit.”

“The Western world spends $134.8 billion a year, $11.2 billion a month, $4,274 a second on foreign development aid. Over the past fifty years, that brings us to a grand total of almost $5 trillion. Sound like a lot? Actually, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost about the same. And let’s not forget that developed countries spend twice as much annually on subsidizing domestic agriculture as they do on foreign aid. But, sure, it’s a lot. Frankly, $5 trillion is an astronomical sum. So then the question is: Has it helped? Here’s where it gets tricky. There’s really only one way to answer this: Nobody knows.”

“Doing randomized controlled trials in poverty-stricken countries is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Often, local organizations are less than eager to cooperate, not least because they’re worried the findings will prove them ineffective. Take the case of microcredit. Development aid trends come and go, from ‘good governance’ to ‘education’ to the ill-fated ‘microcredit’ at the start of this century. Microcredit’s reckoning came in the form of our old friend Esther Duflo, who set up a fatal RCT in Hyderabad, India, and demonstrated that, all the heartwarming anecdotes notwithstanding, there is no hard evidence that microcredit is effective at combating poverty and illness. Handing out cash works way better. As it happens, cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around. RCTs across the globe have shown that over both the long and short term and on both a large and small scale, cash transfers are an extremely successful and efficient tool.”

“The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid. Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could.”

“Imagine there was a single measure that could wipe out all poverty everywhere, raising everybody in Africa above our Western poverty line, and in the process put a few extra months’ salary in our pockets too. Just imagine. Would we take that measure? No. Of course not. After all, this measure has been around for years. It’s the best plan that never happened. I’m talking about open borders. Not just for bananas, derivatives, and iPhones, but for one and all — for knowledge workers, for refugees, and for ordinary people in search of greener pastures.”

“Four different studies have shown that, depending on the level of movement in the global labor market, the estimated growth in ‘gross worldwide product’ would be in the range of 67% to 147%. Effectively, open borders would make the whole world twice as rich.”

“In this era of ‘globalization,’ only 3% of the world’s population lives outside their country of birth.”

“According to the International Monetary Fund, lifting the remaining restrictions on capital would free up at most $65 billion. Pocket change, according to Harvard economist Lant Pritchett. Opening borders to labor would boost wealth by much more — one thousand times more. Sixty-five trillion dollars.”

“Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they could get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders. Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history. Inequality gaps between people living in the same country are nothing in comparison to those between separated global citizenries.”

“In developed countries, employees are expected to be flexible. If you want a job, you have to follow the money. But when ultraflexible labor heads our way from the world’s developing countries, we suddenly see them as economic freeloaders. Those seeking asylum are allowed to stay only if they have reason to fear persecution at home based on their religion or birth.”

“‘The U.S border effect on the wages of equal intrinsic productivity workers is greater than any form of wage discrimination (gender, race, or ethnicity) that has ever been measured,’ observe three economists. It’s apartheid on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country. Yet this modern elite is scarcely aware of how lucky it is.”

“So, if diversity isn’t to blame for the lack of cohesion in modern-day society, what is? The answer is simple: poverty, unemployment, and discrimination. ‘It is not the diversity of a community that undermines trust,’ conclude Abascal and Baldassarri, ‘but rather the disadvantages that people in diverse communities face.”

“Humans didn’t evolve by staying in one place. Wanderlust is in our blood. Go back a few generations and almost everybody has an immigrant in the family tree. And look at modern China, where twenty years ago the biggest migration in world history led to the influx of hundreds of millions of Chinese from the countryside into cities. However disruptive, migration has time and again proven to be one of the most powerful drivers of progress.”

“One thing is certain however: If we want to make the world a better place, there’s no getting around migration. Even just cracking the door would help. If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world’s poor would have $305 billion more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank. That’s the combined total of all development aid — times three.”

“The difficult lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” (John Maynard Keynes)

“‘A man with conviction is a hard man to change.’ So opens Leon Festinger’s account of these evens in When Prophecy Fails, first published in 1956 and a seminal text in social psychology to this day. ‘Tell him you disagree and he turns away,’ Festinger continues. ‘Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.’”

“‘Cognitive dissonance,’ he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.”

“It’s when our political, ideological, or religious ideas are at stake that we get the most stubborn. We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go. Doing so affects our sense of identity and position in social groups — in our churches or families or circle of friends.”

“One factor that certainly is not involved is stupidity. Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody. After all, an education gives you tools to defend your opinions. Intelligent people are highly practiced in finding arguments, experts, and studies that underpin their preexisting beliefs, and the Internet has made it easier than ever to be consumers of our own opinions, with another piece of evidence always just a mouse-click away. Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.”

“Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible.”

“Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perception about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.”

“In the preface to his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom, [Milton Friedman] wrote that it is the duty of thinkers to keep offering alternatives. Ideas that seem ‘politically impossible’ today may one day become ‘politically inevitable.’ ‘Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,’ Friedman explained. ‘When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’” — the importance of intellectual discourse and debate

“‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,’ he wrote, ‘are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’” — ask yourself who are your ideological masters

“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?” — exercising our freedoms is the way we show our appreciation for them.

“Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. ‘Indeed,’ wrote Keynes, ‘the world is ruled by little else.’”

“The path from the ideal to the real is one that never ceases to fascinate me. As the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck famously said, ‘Politics is the art of the possible.’ That impression certainly seems to hold if you follow the news from places like Washington and Westminster. But there’s another form of politics that is much more important. I’m talking about Politics with a capital P, one that’s not about rules, but about revolution. Not about the art of the possible, but about making the impossible inevitable.”

“Where politics acts to reaffirm the status quo, Politics breaks free.”

“Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously?” (Joseph Overton)

“Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable. This window of acceptability is populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into law books.”

“Television, for example, offers little time or space to present fundamentally different opinions. Instead, talk shows feed us an endless merry-go-round of the same people saying the same things.”

“In other words, to make the radical seem reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.”

“Time and again, [underdog socialists] side with society’s unfortunates: poor people, dropouts, asylum seekers, the disabled, and the discriminated against. They decry Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism. They obsess over the proliferation of ‘rifts’ dividing the world into blue-collar and white-collar, poverty and wealth, ordinary people and the one-percenters, and vainly seek to ‘reconnect’ with a constituency that has long since packed its bags. But the underdog socialists’ biggest problem isn’t that they’re wrong. Their biggest problem is that they are dull. Dull as a doorknob. They’ve got no story to tell, nor even any language to convey it in.”

“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.”

“Innovation? Totally. Even now, a vast amount of talent is going wasted. If Ivy League grads once went on to jobs in science, public service, and education, these days they’re far more likely to opt for banking, law, or ad proliferators like Google and Facebook. Stop for a moment to ponder the billions of tax dollars being pumped into training society’s best brains, all so they can learn how to exploit other people as efficiently as possible, and it makes your head spin. Imagine how different things might be if our generation’s best and brightest were to double down on the greatest challenges of our time. Climate change, for example, and the aging population, and inequality…Now that would be real innovation.”

“Efficiency? That’s the whole point. Think about it: every dollar invested in a homeless person returns triple or more in savings on healthcare, police, and court costs alone. Just imagine what the eradication of child poverty might achieve. Solving these kinds of problems is a whole lot more efficient than ‘managing’ them, which costs significantly more in the long run.”

“Let’s give everybody a basic income — venture capital for the people — empowering us to plot the course of our own lives.”

“Across the spectrum from left to right we’re hearing about the need for more work and more jobs. For more politicians and economists, employment is morally neutral: the more, the better. I’d argue that it’s time for a new labor movement. One that fights not only for more jobs and higher wages, but more importantly for work that has intrinsic value. Then we’ll see unemployment rise when we spend more time on mind-numbing marketing, asinine administration, and polluting junk, and drop when we start investing more time in things that fulfill us.”

“Realize that there are more people out there like you. Lots and lots of people. I’ve met countless readers who told me that while they believe absolutely in the ideas from this book, they see the world as a corrupt and greedy place. My answer to them was this: turn off the TV, look around you, and organize. More people really do have their hearts in the right place.”

“My advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what. If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible. Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.”