Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

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.