Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Potential for Positive-Sum Gains

According to Rutger Bregman, too many social institutions are rooted in the assumption that one person’s gain must come at another’s loss. They hold that providing money for the poor, especially without conditions, would take away the taxes someone paid for through their work to reward someone who did nothing to earn the money. They fear that a living wage would lead employers to slash hours or would cause inflation because of an increase in the supply of money. Additionally, they hold that an immigrant, legal or otherwise, takes work or public assistance that should have gone to a native-born citizen. In each of these cases, Bregman shows that these fears thrive on the unknown. Evidence is insufficient, or at least not widely known, to disprove such ideas because fear of the consequences has generally prevented anyone from trying them on a significant scale. The social systems that do exist to address problems such as poverty and immigration seem designed mainly to reinforce preexisting prejudices. Welfare programs make it nearly impossible for a person to escape poverty. The extraordinary difficulty of immigrating legally to the US, along with a bottomless demand for cheap and under-the-table labor, creates a system of undocumented migration that then validates the idea of such people as criminals and even terrorists.

For each of these examples, Bregman shows that these zero-sum gains (in which every gain is offset by an equivalent loss) are both wrong and counterproductive. Whenever cities, states, or countries have provided money to the poor, they generally used it wisely and repaid the debt many times over by benefiting the community. Reducing work hours does not give people more time to indulge in mindless entertainment or alcoholism but rather enriches their lives and relationships. Treating immigrants as human beings deserving of dignity rather than potential threats to be screened contributes enormously to global economic output, easing rather than exacerbating tensions among and within communities. Tradeoffs among competing goods is a real thing but is too often invoked as an ironclad rule that forbids the possibility of mutual gain. Without being overly optimistic, Bregman affirms that greater acceptance of such principles will generate enough evidence to overcome old prejudices and reframe political debates about the most effective way to achieve an ideal rather than reduce a problem to its least worst variant.

The Contingency of History

When a major event occurs, historians tend to treat it as inevitable, even if none saw it coming. One famous example is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was a shock to nearly everyone whose job it was to study that regime. Even so, books and articles soon began to declare the root causes that preordained that collapse, such as the death of the Stalinist generation and the tensions of a generational transfer of power, restive nationalities in Eastern Europe, and blowback from an overly adventurous foreign policy (as evidenced by their brutal war in Afghanistan). This trend of attributing events to vast structural forces is understandable and in some cases worthy. It offers a far more nuanced view of how World War II started than simply as a result of on Hitler’s megalomania, even if that was a factor. As Tocqueville points out, historians within democracies are especially prone to ascribing events to “general causes” because a democratic ethos emphasizes the role of the collective rather than a handful of great individuals, and life amid a large mass of people is a daily reminder of forces beyond the control of any one individual. Tocqueville warns that if people embrace this idea too readily, they will come to believe that they have no part to play in history and are simply marching along with trends they can do nothing to affect. He calls for historians to remind people of what they can accomplish in unison and that cooperation generates their most authentic freedom.

Bregman takes up this task by first warning against Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the “end of history,” not on the familiar grounds that he was too optimistic in declaring the end of ideological struggle, but because this view precluded a reason to imagine something different. When Bregman looks to history, he sees very real structural forces, though they could have manifested in infinite ways. Richard Nixon was on the brink of a universal income bill, which fit his overall political strategy but failed largely because the available lessons of history erroneously suggested that it would be a disaster. Open borders were standard practice into the 20th century, giving way first to the pressures of war and then decolonization, where new borders were meant to help insulate colonial powers from their erstwhile subjects. For decades people assumed that work weeks would decline and boredom would be the most serious social problem. In Bregman’s native Holland, a generous program for the homeless worked wonders until a financial crisis based in Wall Street tanked the global economy. Bregman is not a proponent of the Whig theory of history, which holds that progress is inevitable, if slow. Rather, he holds that contingency works both ways and that good ideas can succeed just as bad ideas triumph. The overall lesson is that people have the power to shape history—not entirely, and not always in ways that they will find satisfying, but acting is always preferable to waiting for structural forces to sort things out on their own.

The Dangers of Inequality

In 2019, Bregman became famous when he criticized attendees of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for talking about inequality while failing to address the tax avoidance that contributes so much to that problem. Forum attendees are generally rich and powerful but pride themselves on their humanitarian ethos. They seriously consider issues such as climate change, migration, and inequality. They meet with like-minded people to discuss how to solve these problems and often raise or directly contribute significant sums of money. Bregman’s fundamental critique is that whatever good such people may be doing, they treat inequality as an aesthetic problem. In other words, they consider it unfortunate that some people are poor while others (like the Davos crowd) are so immensely wealthy, and they would therefore like to help those who are poor become less so. That is not an ignoble instinct—and is, by most measures, preferable to concluding that the poor are deserving of their condition because of a presumed moral failing—but it has a major flaw: It fails to see any causal relationship between the existence of massively concentrated wealth and the yawning gulf between that and the poor. The wealthy tend to think that a transfer of resources will help reset the balance but not in a way that will fundamentally threaten their position. They want to think of themselves as part of the solution precisely because they are part of the problem.

As Bregman points out, however, inequality is not just a moral problem but an active social one. It is not mainly a problem of resources, as such, as much as relative resources. Poor people in a modern developed state are far better off than practically anyone in centuries past but still recognize that they are at the bottom of a ladder on which the top is practically invisible. Medieval peasants knew that nearly everyone else was in a similar condition, but modern capitalism introduces countless distinctions through which citizens may compare one another. Inequality raises the stakes of that social competition, promising fantastic rewards and, far more importantly, threatening dire losses. Those on the top can buy enough power and influence to preserve their position across generations while making money from their wealth rather than any productive labor. Those on the bottom will spend more time fighting one another to climb one rung rather than organize to challenge the entire system. The promise of equal rights and opportunity as promised by a democracy becomes a dead letter.