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.

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12019998

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.”

This is a good book to introduce the concepts of Social Democracy, and how the science & evidence strongly supports the efficacy of such proposals: UBI, reducing the work week, less hindered international migration, striving toward an actual meritocracy instead of focusing on bullshit jobs and the stupid GDP.

Pretty much everything this guy talks about is stuff I already know and support. Though he claims to be the guy who brought the concept of UBI into the zeitgeist in the 21st century. (His original version was published in 2014).

I've got my own gripes about SocDem, which I've complained about before, but I'll be taking his suggestion:
“The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.”

I'll be the radical making his ideas seem sensible.

If you're to the right of SocDem, read this. If you're SocDem, read it to learn more.

If you're on the left, you probably already know about all this and can skip it.

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.

“If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible”.

Lleno de datos, artículos, estudios y más, este libro tiene algunas de las ideas más ¿revolucionarias? para los problemas más grandes de la humanidad, y aún así todas han sido probadas antes...

Además, escrito sin jerga académica complicada, divertido y esperanzador, sin ser cursi o condescendiente.

Really only advocated for two policies - and they are good policies.

The book doesn't do much steelmanning but it does provide some good evidence to advocate for the policies. Problem is that I was already for Universal Basic Income prior to this, so I did just nod my head along with the book and a lot of the justifications it made, I knew before hand. But it is a good book to have a conversation with someone who decries it as “socialism” or “impractical”

But when the book advocates for open borders, I am still a little bit unconvinced. Walking away from the book with “I think I should do more research” is probably not the book's intended effect. This is a controversial issue so it does not really apply to American problems as opposed to how it is in Europe because there are a lot of talking points that the book ignores.

But overall, it was a good quick read.

Short review: it's garbage.

Longer review, originally posted at http://sandymaguire.me/blog/utopia-for-realists/:

Rutger Bergman's Utopia for Realists is a book whose primary thesis is that we should have a guaranteed minimum income (GMI).

I must admit, I was pretty sold on a guaranteed minimum income before reading this book. I hadn't thought too much about it, besides the fact that lots of smart people I know say it's a good idea, and that obviously we're going to need a solution to what happens to humans after we automate away all of the jobs.

After reading this book, I am significantly less on-board with the idea.

What it boils down to is that Utopia for Realists isn't very good. If these are the best arguments for a GMI, well... let's hope that they're not the best arguments for a GMI.

I can't make up my mind on whether this book is merely incompetent or actively dishonest.

For example, the book discusses the Speenhamland system, which it describes as an early form of GMI, and then discusses a contemporary report which described it as a failed experiment. But then Utopia for Realists turns around with the sentence “more recent research has revealed that the Speenhamland system was actually a success.” A description of how the original study was supposedly flawed, but no citation to back it up. No reference to which “more recent research” reveals resounding success. There are lots of other citations in the book. Why not one here?

Utopia makes some other bold claims without backing them up; here's a few that bothered me enough to mark them down:

“Ultimately, the perfect, self-regulating market proved an illusion.”
“The historian Brian Steesland... emphasizes that, had Nixon's plan gone ahead, the ramifications would have been huge... No longer would there be such a thing as the ‘deserving' or ‘undeserving poor' [no citation]”

There was another time I wanted to check a source. The book makes a case for “giving housing/money to homeless people is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of not” via a case study. I'm willing to believe this; prevention is usually a better strategy than treatment. OK, fine. What I wanted to check was the cost breakdown; Utopia describes the project as costing $217 million, and being responsible for getting 6,500 people off of the streets over nine years. This struck me as being exorbitantly expensive, and I wanted to check their methodologies and math.

The given citation for this “unmitigated success” was to a random pdf on the Utrecht municipal website which doesn't exist anymore. I didn't try any harder than this to find the document. The citation describing the experiment points to a Dutch news site (that Google annoyingly refuses to translate) that looks more like an op-ed than anything official, but more damningly, doesn't provide any links closer to the original source.

Bregman's grasp of economics is pretty tenuous. For example:

From a certain perspective, [Bastiat] says, breaking a window sounds like a fine idea. “Imagine it costs six francs to repair the damage. And imagine that this creates a commercial gain of six francs—I confess there's no arguing with this reasoning. The glazier comes along, does his work, and happily pockets six francs...” [emphasis mine]

No arguing? Except that the glazier charges a fair price to replace the window, so he is only marginally better off after replacing the window, but the world has lost one window and the owner is the worse-off for it.

He goes on:

Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor's [sic] checkups can't simply be made “more efficient.”

This is absurdly stupid. We've all taken classes that were long-winded and boring. The quality of a teacher has a huge bearing on how efficiently we learn from them. Websites like Khan Academy are teaching entire university courses in a fraction of the time it would take to do through the usual channels. Doctors' checkups can and have been made more efficient; it's not an accident that doctors carry stethoscopes and have access to MRI machines.

But Bergman persists:

... the government is gobbling up a growing share of the economic pie... this phenomenon is now known as “Baumol's cost disease,” basically says that prices in labor-intensive sectors such as healthcare and education increase faster than prices in sectors where most of the work can be more extensively automated... shouldn't we be calling this a blessing, rather than a disease? After all, the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and infirm and to organize education on a more personal scale.

When you're obsessed with efficient 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 the costs. They don't realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors.

No no no no no no. Cost disease doesn't say “we spend too much on healthcare and education.” It says “we spend too much on healthcare and education on the margin.” Which is to say that in less cost-diseased countries, spending an additional $1,000 will buy you a lot more than the same additional $1,000 in a more cost-diseased place.

Cost disease is the phenomenon that we're paying more to get less. For example, Thailand has a booming dentistry industry among Australians because you can get the same quality work done for significantly less money. This isn't “exploiting Thai workers” nor is it “taking jobs away from Australians”—it's just Australian cost disease.

A significantly smaller portion of the book describes the fifteen-hour workweek is an ideal one. Sure! Sounds good! But, Bergman says, “breaking the vicious cycle [of the 40 hour workweek] will require collective action—by companies, or better yet, by countries.”

I don't get this one. If you want to work less than 40 hours, just... work less than 40 hours? Nobody is forcing you, except your spending habits. As it happens, life is actually pretty cheap. Find a small apartment, share it with some roommates, and eat a lot of rice. You can definitely manage to do it for less than $800 a month if you're willing to shop around—and especially if you're willing to move.

The secret is to just not spend money. That means stop eating lavish meals. Don't get a pet. Don't buy a vehicle. Stop drinking and smoking and give up whatever other vices you have that cost a bunch of money. It sounds dumb, but the secret to not working very much is to not need a lot of money.

And then use your extra time to learn how to do something valuable so that you can work even less.

At the end of the day, I get the strong impression that this book was written backwards. Bergman very clearly believes in his cause, and has worked backwards trying to find arguments that support it—as evidenced by the sloppy citation work, numerous straw-men and gross-misunderstanding of the arguments against his point of view.

It's a particularly bad sign when a book is so bad that it makes people on your side agree with you less after reading it. Give this one a miss, but if you're looking for a significantly better resource championing MGI, look no further than Slate Star Codex's take on same.