Utopia for Realists

There are three main ideas covered, surrounded with an introduction where the author states there's little difference between the left and right, and an epilogue that claims leftists are losing because they're boring. I'm inclined to think the author is a libertarian who thinks he's a liberal, but that's applying US labels to a Dane.

The three big ideas are: UBI, a 15 hr work week, and open borders. At this point, the only reason to not implement UBI is religion. I'm more conflicted about the 15hr work week. I think that a significant portion of the population would choose the take a second job. At least in America, we're simply too infected with the Puritan work ethic (meaning, you're evil if you aren't working.) And the third is unfeasible until we rid humanity of not just religion but religious impulses. (I, simplistically, think that nationalism is a religious impulses.)

Overall, I think that the author makes the exact same mistake that I do, by arguing about what is good by touting what is productive and efficient. In his defense, I don't think the title was Utopia for Idealists.

Eye-opening! Even for someone with a liberal bent like myself, this book helped to clarify the arguments for a reduced workweek, basic income, and open borders. It helped me realize that, if you look at the facts these are actually really practical propositions. And, we almost had a basic income under a Republican president! We were "this" close.

Rutger's facts-based approach, with ample citations, firmly grounds his proposals. These aren't bleeding-heart tax-and-spend liberal shibboleths. These are pragmatic approaches to helping lift the world out of poverty, improve the human condition, and make everyone happier in their own lives.

He has convinced me to set sail for the next Utopia:

“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 realisation of Utopias.” — Oscar Wilde

I picked up Utopia for Realists after seeing a reference to Bregman's work in Johann Hari's book Lost Connections. Hari describes Bregman as a "leading expert" in economic policy and the universal basic income in Europe. However, this is obviously a stretch of Bregman's true credentials. He is a millennial with an abiding interest in economic justice whose primary professional occupation is being a journalist—not an academically trained economist.

On the whole, Bregman offers some food for thought about the possibilities inherent in creating a Universal Basic Income (hereafter, UBI) in the West. For those who are not familiar with UBI, it is the suggestion that to combat growing economic inequality and the rising tide of unemployment due to automation and AI, western governments need to provide people with direct cash payments (usually suggested to match the poverty line) so that they have guaranteed income.

Those on the right see UBI as a disincentive to work, welfare on steroids, and most likely the cause of general moral degeneration. But Bregman offers most of the liberal talking points that are couched in several prominent sociological and anthropological studies of UBI experiments in Canada, Europe, and in the United States—all of which suggested that providing people with UBI freed them up to pursue educational opportunities, kept children from going hungry and kept them in school longer, enriched the pursuit of art, and forced low-income wage work to incentivize pay and benefits to attract workers. I'm fairly convinced by most of these points, but I found Bregman's treatment of UBI very shallow. I'll have to dig deeper into other works for more information.

The other two portions of this book deal with the "15-hour workweek" and "open borders." The latter is laughably slapped together. If AI will make jobs scarce by the 2030s, creating a joblessness problem necessitating UBI in the United States, how does that square with "open borders" and mass immigration? He doesn't answer that apparent contradiction. Moreover, he says nothing about the real effects of "brain drain" from the developing world due to open borders which inhibits real progress in other countries. As many other scholars have noted, mass immigration to the West and Asia will not solve global poverty. These sections of the book (roughly 1/2) are intellectually lazy and unconvincing. I would look elsewhere for more on the merits of these policies.

In the past, Bregman argues, the problem was people were poor, ugly, sick and stupid. In the present, the problem was that people have lost their dreams. All of the dreams that were possible in the past have been realized, and nowhere is that more true than in the US, where the per capita income and life expectancy have skyrocketed in just the last two hundred years. Per capita income is up 50-fold and life-expectancy has doubled. But instead of settling, we need new dreams of an even brighter future.

Just that message alone is a refreshing antidote to the mounting concern that society is crumbling over the past month and a half. Bregman then pitches the book on providing evidence for three utopian ideas: a universal basic income (UBI), a 15 hour work week and open borders.

Like most probable readers, I was already pretty familiar with UBI (an idea that I thought I invented several years ago before finding out about the Manitoba mincome experiment) and I thought I knew pretty much the basic primer, but I didn't know about Nixon's failed UBI proposal. Bregman also provides the most optimistic statistical analysis of UBI and how its sustainable that I've ever seen (more on that later), making it sound like an actually feasible idea. This section, prima facie, really lives up to the "for realists" segment, focusing on studies supporting the financial sustainability of UBI, and I thought that this was the strongest (and bulkiest) section.

In contrast, the Open Border section is pretty short, basically: countries that accept immigrants make more money than those that don't; immigrants, and in particular refugees are less likely to be involved in crime, and any criminal activity is predicted by socioeconomic status and that immigrants are more likely to return to their home country in open borders (and that the more we've militarized the US-Mexico border, the higher percentage of undocumented immigrants that stay here, so that clearly fits well with the plan for a Wall.) It all makes sense, but is a pretty anemic chapter.

Finally, the fifteen hour work week is more fleshed out, and there's some good thought processes there (i.e. that working longer hours decreases productivity, especially in creative jobs and that there are fewer good jobs than there are people) but there's not a lot of hard data.

Honestly, I thought the book's best ideas weren't the ostensible main ideas but were things that came up in the interstitial pages:
1. Is GDP actually a good measure and what can we use instead that would be more congruent with cultural values? Let's get rid of productivity and efficiency as goals, and concentrate on creativity and innovation, which is less metric-able
2. So many people are doing "bullshit" jobs, where they move around money, but don't do any societal or personal good. 1/3 of Americans think their job is pointless and doesn't bring them satisfaction. Let's get rid of dumb jobs and use the money to subsidize actually important work, like teachers and social workers, paid for by taxes on the financial industry.
3. Social good can be measured, just like anything else, and can be optimized by using randomized controlled trials to try out new ideas and see how much good they bring.

And finally, as a balm to my anxiety about what the best way to respond to the growing decline of political liberalism, Bregman has a strategy: use Politics as a way to move the Overton window to the left: for too long, the Global Right has been moving more and more right, while the progressive parties talk about compromises and being reasonable. But each new rightwing extremist defines deviance down, so what we perceive as moderation shifts further and further right. Bregman encourages readers to use the statistics he presents to calmly and logically argue back in the other direction, and convince politicians to run on truly progressive agenda.

So the downsides? I've hinted at a couple of them: like many books that seem to have started as a collection of essays, I found Utopia for Realists a little disorganized, and at times disjointed. I found I had to read large chunks at a time, or I would get lost because Bergman will revisit ideas that he previously explored without noting that it was discussed in a prior chapter. I thought the three sections were a little artificial -- the topics relate to each other, and the information between the Big Ideas, I thought was as worthy of fleshing out, and perhaps one chapter per concept would have provided an internal structure that the book seemed to lack. Finally, and perhaps my biggest criticism is that Bergman told, rather than showed the statistics, and for a book that prides itself on being "for realists" and data-driven, I wanted to see the data. In at least three different spots, Bergman talks about data showing one thing, than being reanalyzed and showing another. That's normal for such highly charged, politicized topics, but as a reader with a strong mathematical background, I wanted more evidence about why I should believe the reanalysis over the original results: what was the statistical error? What other analyses have been done?

Overall, though, I thought Utopia for Realists was a fresh take on the topic of how to make the world a better place. I liked that Bergman focused on some concrete ideas, and looked to bring in evidence for each, within the context of a philosophical idea to dream bigger. Often with books like this, I wonder who the intended audience is, but I think with the stated goal of encouraging liberals to use data to shift the Overton window, Bergman answers that question and it's a good answer: this book isn't intended to change the minds of people who are opposed to UBI or a 15 hour workweek or open borders (or housing first, or direct cash assistance, or randomized controlled trials of social justice), but to change the minds of people who are in favor of all of those things, but afraid to look impractical. I'm still not totally convinced, but I feel better than I did before reading it.