Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

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.

Une réflexion éminemment intéressante sur des questions qu'il est grand temps de se poser (semaine de 15h, revenu de base universel, ouverture des frontières), posées de façon méthodique et appuyées par de sérieuses études. Un ensemble de pensées par quelqu'un qui ose rêver d'utopies et d'un monde meilleur, à une époque qui a cruellement besoin d'un avenir vers lequel regarder.

“Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again.”

Our guts (and the guts of the capitalist elite) might tell us that ideas like Universal Basic Income, shorter work weeks and open borders might never help us achieve utopian visions of a world without poverty, a world of equality. But why trusts our pessimistic guts, when we can just test these ideas in scientific studies? We can and we have, and they show that people are much more likely to lift themselves out of poverty when they receive unconditional money. They show that governments that provide free universal health care end up spending less in total on hospital and social worker bills. They show that we are healthier and more productive if we work less.
Then why is it still so hard to believe the evidence and execute these ideas?

The story of how close Nixon came to implementing UBI is fascinating. Incredibly, how in the end he chose to trust a supposedly failed 19th century trial (without proper control measurements, and which turned out to be successful after all) over multiple successful 20th century trials. Similarly, how that one stat about UBI raising divorce numbers (which later also turned out to be wrong) turned people against it.

It's a fight against our guts. And a good reminder that randomized control trials are powerful, but that it's so important to verify all the numbers, and to control against all bias.

GiveDirectly has proven that handing out money directly to people in need, has a more positive effect then spending the same amount of money on the salary of a support network (people we send in to ‘help').

Great to have this book come out of the Netherlands, which with the rest of northern Europe is a frontrunner in all these movements.

This is a great little trigger book, it is fundamentally about our inability to imagine, our contracting ability to fantasise ourselves into the future.

Without data and analysis, nothing can change and even then, it seems that progress is easily sabotaged.

Yet, if we've given up on actually seeing the world, seeing what isn't being measured, isn't that even more tragic.

Ideology. Ignorance. Inertia.