Rutger Bregman

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

More praise for Humankind ‘An extraordinarily powerful declaration of faith in the innate goodness and natural decency of human beings. Never dewy-eyed, wistful or naive, Rutger Bregman makes a wholly robust and convincing case for believing – despite so much apparent evidence to the contrary – that we are not the savage, irredeemably greedy, violent and rapacious species we can be led into thinking ourselves to be’ Stephen Fry ‘Every revolution in human affairs – and we’re in one right now! – comes in tandem with a new understanding of what we mean by the word “human”. Rutger Bregman has succeeded in reawakening that conversation by articulating a kinder view of humanity (with better science behind it).

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It is an essential part of the campaign for a better world’ Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level ‘A fantastic read … Good fun, fresh and a page turner’ James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life ‘This stunning book will change how you see the world and your fellow humans. It is mind-expanding and, more importantly, heart-expanding. We have never needed this message more than now’ Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections ‘Rutger Bregman’s extraordinary new book is a revelation’ Susan Cain, author of Quiet ‘Rutger Bregman is one of my favourite thinkers. His latest book challenges our basic assumptions about human nature in a way that opens up a world of new possibilities. Humankind is simple, perceptive and powerful in the way that the best books and arguments are’ Andrew Yang ‘I have not read anything quite as stunningly well written, insightful and revelatory for a very long time.

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So long, in fact, that I cannot remember the last time’ Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1% ‘This book demolishes the cynical view that humans are inherently nasty and selfish, and paints a portrait of human nature that’s not only more uplifting – it’s also more accurate. Rutger Bregman is one of the most provocative thinkers of our time’ Adam Grant, author of Give and Take ‘Put aside your newspaper for a little while and read this book’ Barry Schwartz, author of Practical Wisdom ‘I know of no more powerful or carefully documented rejoinder to Machiavelli’s observation that “men never do anything good except out of necessity” than Rutger Bregman’s book. His reassessment of human nature is as faithful to the actual evidence as it is uplifting’ Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others ‘Humankind articulates what we anthropologists have been arguing for decades, only far more beautifully.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

– Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work “The impact of this book in the Netherlands has been huge. Not only did Rutger Bregman launch a highly successful and long-running debate in the media, he also inspired a movement across the country that is putting his ideas into practice. Now it’s time for the rest of the world.” – Joris Luyendijk, bestselling author of Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers “Rutger Bregman writes with an exceptional voice. He shows both deep knowledge of the history and technical aspects of Basic Income and the ability to discuss it in a way that is meaningful and captivating even to people who are completely new to the topic.” – Karl Widerquist, Associate Professor at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University, and co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network “Utopia for Realists is an important book, a wonderfully readable breath of fresh air, a window thrown open to a better future.

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Bregman shows us we’ve been looking at the world inside out. Turned right way out we suddenly see fundamentally new ways forward. If we can get enough people to read this book, the world will start to become a better place.” – Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better “Rutger Bregman makes a compelling case for Universal Basic Income with a wealth of data and rooted in a keen understanding of the political and intellectual history of capitalism. He shows the many ways in which human progress has turned a Utopia into a Eutopia – a positive future that we can achieve with the right policies.” – Albert Wenger, entrepreneur and partner at Union Square Ventures, early backers of Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Kickstarter “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions.

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The answers, it turns out, are already there, and Bregman combines deep research with wit, challenging us to think anew about how we want to live and who we want to be. Required reading.” – Philipp Blom, historian and author of The Vertigo Years. Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 and A Wicked Company. The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment “If energy, enthusiasm and aphorism could make the world better, then Rutger Bregman’s book would do it. Even in translation from the Dutch, the writing is powerful and fluent… a boisterously good read.” – The Independent Utopia for Realists © 2016 The Correspondent Cover Design by Harald Dunnink and Martijn van Dam (Momkai) English Translation by Elizabeth Manton Author Illustration by Cléa Dieudonné Infographics by Momkai Layout Design by Pre Press Media Groep ISBN 978 90 822 5639 0 Original title Gratis geld voor iedereen: en nog vijf grote ideeën die de wereld kunnen veranderen Contents 1.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

“true individual freedom”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” Jan. 11, 1944. Chapter Ten: $1,000 a Month Charles Murray: Charles Murray, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Andy Stern: Stern, Raising the Floor. Rutger Bregman: Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (Amsterdam: The Correspondent, 2016). Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2015).

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Charles Murray wants to give all adults $10,000 a year while eliminating the entirety of the welfare state. Andy Stern wants to give adults $1,000 a month while eliminating much of it. Yet others advocate for pairing a UBI with a radical program of open borders and a dramatically curtailed workweek, as the Dutch writer Rutger Bregman does in his book Utopia for Realists. Yet others see a UBI as a way to bridge the country to a postcapitalist world without work, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams do in their book Inventing the Future. Yet others push for giving a grant to children at birth, to be used in adulthood and to be taxed back at death.

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Henry Morley (1901; Project Gutenberg 2005), ebook, https://www.gutenberg.org/​files/​2130/​2130-h/​2130-h.htm. the “loss of his or her natural inheritance”: Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797), ebook, http://xroads.virginia.edu/​~hyper/​Paine/​header.html. The British Speenhamland system: Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (Amsterdam: The Correspondent, 2016). “civilization” owed everyone a minimal existence: Simon Birnbaum and Karl Widerquist, “History of Basic Income,” Basic Income Earth Network (blog), http://basicincome.org/​basic-income/​history/; adapted from L’allocation universelle by Yannick Vanderborght and Philippe Van Parijs (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth. There’s a tendency for rich people to dismiss poor people as weak-willed children with no cost discipline. The evidence runs in the other direction. As the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman and others put it, “Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.” Scarcity research indicates that the best way to improve decision making is to free up people’s bandwidth. People won’t ever make perfect choices. But knowing that their basic needs are accounted for will lead to better choices for millions of people each day.

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Lauren Zalaznick, Cheryl Houser, Eric Bahn, Miles Lasater, Bernie Sucher, Kathryn Bendheim, Daniel Tarullo, Miika Grady, Scott Krase, Eric Cantor, Lawrence Yang, Owen Johnson, Chip Hazard, Chris Boggiano, Marian Salzman, Guillermo Silberman, and many others provided phenomenal insight into early drafts. Albert Wenger, Josh Kopelman, Rutger Bregman, David Brooks, J. D. Vance, Jean Twenge, Lisa Wade, Victor Tan Chen, Yuval Harari, Steve Case, David Autor, Krystal Ball, Ryan Avent, Alec Ross, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Chris Hughes, Derek Thompson, Steve Glickman, John Lettieri, Rana Foroohar, Tim O’Reilly, Dylan Matthews, Annie Lowrey, Ross Baird, Nick Hanauer, David Rose, and Scott Santens shaped my thinking on many points, generally without knowing it.

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The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009: Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers (New York: Crown Business, 2016), p. 9. Citing Emmanuel Saez,“Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” June 30, 2016. The wealthy experience higher levels of depression and suspicion in unequal societies: Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2016), p. 67. …“People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast… and our organizations aren’t keeping up”: Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), p. 40.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Asteroid Miners and Aspiring Immortals In the last decade, a growing number of future-positive books have suggested political and economic changes that might seem far-fetched, but are increasingly debated as real possibilities. The French economist Thomas Piketty has called for a progressive supranational wealth tax to combat income inequality.13 The Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman has promoted several utopian visions “for realists,” including open borders and a fifteen-hour workweek.14 In Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, Greek-American engineer Peter Diamandis (founder of XPRIZE, which rewards inventors for technological developments that benefit humanity) and science journalist Steven Kotler look to the wonders of artificial intelligence and advances in robotics to propose technological solutions to problems like food scarcity, aging populations, and climate change.

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This is not just fluffy positive thinking; it is learning to “remember” the future using a similar set of mental acuities as those we use to remember the past. For those of us afraid of regret, fearful of risk, and frozen by the thought that things could get worse, the hardest step will be to give in to hope. As the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman observes, embracing a positive vision for the future usually means “weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic.”45 That is why we need to hope together: out loud, with each other, every day.

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Alix Kates Shulman, freely available at the Anarchist Library, https://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-socialism-caught-in-the-political-trap. 8 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936; New York: Martin, 2015): 341–43. 9 William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision-Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1, no. 1 (February 1988): 7–59. 10 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “The Psychology of Preferences,” Scientific American 246, no. 1 (January 1982): 160–73. 11 Scott Timberg, “The Novel That Predicted Portland,” New York Times, December 12, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/fashion/14ecotopia.html. 12 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 232–33. 13 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 14 Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We can Build the Ideal World (New York: Little, Brown, 2017). 15 Wade Davis, “Keynote Speech: The Ethnosphere and the Academy,” 2014, https://www.wheretherebedragons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DavisEthnosphereAcademy.pdf. 16 For the full text and a video of the 1997 Apple “Think Different” ad, see: http://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html. 17 See the website of the Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University: https://www.climaterepair.cam.ac.uk. 18 Fred Pearce, “Geoengineer the Planet?

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he thus says, “that at some point we will have basic minimum income.” Many other thinkers share Straub’s confidence in the inevitable radical reinvention of our industrial social security system. From Zurich I fly to Amsterdam to meet with another of Europe’s leading champions of the basic minimum income, Rutger Bregman. Originally from Utrecht, the Dutch city that is pioneering a 2017 scheme to pay its residents an unconditional monthly stipend, Bregman is the author of the aptly named Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World,10 a bestselling polemic in favor of universal basic income, which has been translated into twenty languages.

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Educating “useless” people for a world without work is, in some ways, a Sisyphean task. Relying on the super-citizens of our gilded age like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg to save the world is, to say the least, risky. And paying people to do nothing in an age of smart machines—as idealists like Rutger Bregman and the Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger want—is not going to automatically create a Marxian idyll of farmers, fishermen, hunters, and critics. In contrast with Holbein’s map of the little island of Utopia, our map is global. In the mid-nineteenth century, the economic historian Eric Hobsbawn reminds us, Britain was the only genuinely industrialized country.

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Yuval Noah Harari, “The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work,” Guardian, May 8, 2017. 7. Andy Stern, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2016). 8. John Thornhill, “A Universal Basic Income Is an Old Idea with Modern Appeal,” Financial Times, March 14, 2016. 9. More, Utopia, 51. 10. Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Little Brown, 2017). 11. Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, 2016). 12. Albert Wenger, World After Capital (worldaftercapital.org 2016). 13. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton, 2014), 213. 14.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

Buried in those dusty boxes of data in the Canadian national archives, Evelyn might have found one of the most important antidepressants for the twenty-first century. I wanted to understand the implications of this more, and to explore my own concerns and questions about it, so I went to see a brilliant Dutch economic historian named Rutger Bregman. He is the leading European champion of the idea of a universal basic income.4 We ate burgers and inhaled caffeinated drinks and ended up talking late into the night, discussing the implications of all this. “Time and again,” he said, “we blame a collective problem on the individual. So you’re depressed?

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And a further 23 percent Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 41–3; Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (London: Canongate, 2011), 111. There’s an excellent discussion of how we are prepared for this in the unfairly forgotten book by Joel Spring, A Primer On Libertarian Education (Toronto: Black Rose Books, 1999). One professor who has studied this Fleming, Mythology of Work, 35. Other shocking stats about this in Rutger Bregman, Utopia, For Realists (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 41. “derealization” Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive (London: Canongate, 2016), 157. people would come in with problems in their lives Michael Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2. One day in the late 1960s Ibid., 3.

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Chapter 22: Reconnection Seven: Restoring the Future In the middle of the 1970s, a group of Canadian government officials chose This account is based on interviewing Evelyn Forget and reading her published papers, especially Evelyn Forget, “The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment,” Canadian Public Policy 37, no. 3 (2011), doi: 10.3138/cpp.37.3.283. I have also drawn on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), and Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (Netherlands: Correspondent Press, 2016). I have also drawn on these articles: Zi-Ann Lum, “A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty and Nearly Everyone Forgot About It,” Huffington Post, January 3, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html; Benjamin Shingler, “Money for nothing: Mincome experiment could pay dividends 40 years on,” Aljazeera America, August 26, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html; Stephen J.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

So, I looked at the things that I would need to do to run for president: present a vision, make an argument, raise money, build a team, write a book, get press, grow an organization, give rise to a movement, go a couple years without a salary. I figured I had done or could do most all of those things. But, if elected, what would I actually do to fix the problems I had identified? I had first discovered universal basic income a few years earlier through thinkers like Andy Stern, Martin Ford, and Rutger Bregman. It struck me as inevitable that we would adopt universal basic income eventually, but it was still a marginal idea that most people had never heard of. I thought I could bring it to the mainstream and that my campaign could accelerate the end of poverty and begin a movement toward a better and more sustainable way of life for tens of millions of people.

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I owe a massive intellectual debt in this book to Ezra Klein, Katherine Gehl, Michael Porter, and Lawrence Lessig, whose work I reference heavily. Thank you to Roger McNamee, Tristan Harris, Jim Steyer, Jaron Lanier, Enoch Liang, Mark Mao, Shoshana Zuboff, and Alastair Mactaggart for being voices of conscience in technology and data and steering my thinking. Thank you to Sam Altman, Rutger Bregman, Annie Lowrey, Andy Stern, Scott Santens, Gisele Huff, Michael Tubbs, and everyone else who has been leading us to universal basic income. Thank you to everyone who has supported Humanity Forward and its vision of an economy that works for people, including Albert Wenger, Susan Danziger, Daniel Negreanu, J.

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I had first discovered universal basic income Andy Stern, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, with Lee Kravitz (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016); Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (New York: Back Bay Books, 2018). CHAPTER 3: THE WING DING IS STACKED AGAINST ME; OR, HOW WE LEARN ABOUT CANDIDATES And in Iowa only 171,517 “Presidential Election in Iowa, 2016,” Ballotpedia. In the summer of 2018 Andrew Yang, “We Must Evolve to a New Form of Capitalism,” 2018 Iowa Wing Ding, YouTube, uploaded Aug. 20, 2018, www.youtube.com/​watch?

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

Indeed, many retired people feel very happy and say that the most difficult period of their life was in the middle, when they had young children, mortgages, and career development to grapple with. Some retirees even say that they don’t know how they ever found time to go to work. A combination of bridge and golf (if you can stand it) can be made to take up most of the week. And if that’s not enough there is always voluntary work. According to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, the countries with the shortest working weeks also have the largest numbers of volunteers and the most “social capital.”26 Yet there are many people who do find not working difficult. Oscar Wilde once said: “Work is the refuge of the people who have nothing better to do.”27 As long ago as 1964 the great science fiction writer and visionary Isaac Asimov envisaged that the death of work would cause serious emotional and psychological consequences.

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Or rather with what we think are the facts. For, like so many other critical issues in economics, this one is bedeviled by controversy. Certainly, the conventional wisdom is that over recent years the distribution of income and/or wealth has been becoming more unequal. According to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in the USA, the gap between rich and poor is “already wider than it was in ancient Rome – an economy founded on slave labor.”4 Whether or not this is an exaggeration, the bare statistics do show a marked increase in inequality. In the USA, between 1962 and 1979, the annual average growth in real disposable income for people in the bottom quintile of the income distribution was almost 5.5 percent, compared to less than 2 percent for people in the top quintile.

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He argued that, by putting the onus on local authorities, poor relief was a tactic used by employers to keep wages low. Other staunch opponents of the Speenhamland system included such eminent thinkers as Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville. According to the contemporary radical Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, however, all these thinkers condemned the Speenhamland system without examining the data. He says that such suffering as there was under the system was caused by Britain’s resumption of gold convertibility in 1821, and the rise of labor-saving machinery.12 According to him, “capitalist or communist, it all boils down to a pointless distinction between two types of poor, and to a major misconception that we almost managed to dispel some forty years ago – the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.”13 Side benefits of UBI While economists have argued about the effects of UBI on the incentives to work, with there being a respectable case in both directions, some defenders of the idea have been able to counter with some different, and sometimes quirky, arguments.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Bentoism Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality How Ideas Work Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind John Higgs, The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain Economics Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Updated and Expanded) Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.

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“not in my business”: As reported by Axios (“Forget About Broad-Based Pay Raises, Executives Say,” May 27, 2018) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas event “Technology-Enabled Disruption: Implications for Business, Labor Markets, and Monetary Policy” on May 24–25, 2018. Lazonick has put it: Lazonick’s characterization of buybacks as “profits without prosperity” was in Harvard Business Review (“Profits Without Prosperity,” September 2014). universal basic income: Two recommended books to learn more about universal basic income: Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and Annie Lowrey’s Give People Money. debt to enter the workforce: Background and stats on student loans come from CNBC (“Why Does a College Degree Cost So Much?” in 2015 and “Student Loan Balances Jump Nearly 150 Percent in a Decade” in 2017). elections are decided almost entirely by money: The 2015 report on the relationship between campaign expenditures and campaign results (“How Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence”) was written by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen and published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Teresa Iacobelli and Barbara Shubinski, “‘Without Distinction of Race, Sex, or Creed’: The General Education Board, 1903–1964,” RE:source, Rockefeller Archive Center, January 5, 2022, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-general-education-board-1903-1964/. 4. Jeremy Norman, “Andrew Carnegie Donates the First Carnegie Library to His Hometown, Dunfermine, Scotland,” HistoryofInformation.com, July 6, 2022, https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3000. 5. Rutger Bregman, “Rutger Bregman Tells Davos to Talk about Tax: ‘This Is Not Rocket Science,’” YouTube video, 1:45, posted by Guardian News on January 29, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0. 6. Nick Hanauer, “Better Schools Won’t Fix America,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/education-isnt-enough/590611/. 7.

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When education reform and extreme inequality duel, extreme inequality tends to win, since well-heeled parents ensure well-resourced schools. Yet philanthropists like Morgan continue to be surprised that it is so difficult to reform schools in low-wealth communities of color, even when those communities lack resources. When historian Rutger Bregman attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, he made a similar observation. Like Milken attendees, Davos participants were also searching for ways to drive systemic change without addressing wealth inequality. “It feels as if I’m at a firefighters’ conference,” Bregman remarked, “and no one is allowed to speak about water.”5 The view that education reform is the linchpin to fighting poverty is so commonly held among wealthy philanthropists that there is now a term for it.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

Finally, “Share” explains how shorter workweeks could change the future of work, how they could help us deal with rising levels of stress and burnout, how they create new ways of solving problems posed by automation and AI, and how they could even contribute to fighting inequality and climate change. Using design thinking as a framework also keeps us focused on the question of “How can I do this?” I don’t just want to present an abstract or moral case for a shorter workweek; others, like historian Rutger Bregman and the New Economics Foundation in London, are already making that argument. Instead, I want to show how companies are actually doing it and show you how you could redesign the workday at your own company. If you’re a manager or company owner, this book will lay out the steps you can follow to implement a four-day workweek or six-hour day: how to design a trial period; how to sell it to clients and investors; how to get your employees on board; how to redesign meetings, technology, and the workday itself to become more focused, effective, and productive; and how to measure the results.

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Good introductions to design thinking are Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: Harper Business, 2009), and Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, and Larry Leifer, The Design Thinking Playbook: Mindful Digital Transformation of Teams, Products, Services, Businesses and Ecosystems (New York: Wiley, 2018). The case for shortening working hours has been made recently in Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (New York: Little, Brown, 2017); Stan De Spiegelaere and Agnieszka Piasna, The Why and How of Working Time Reduction (European Trade Union Institute, 2017); and Will Stronge and Aidan Harper, eds., The Shorter Working Week: A Radical and Pragmatic Proposal (Autonomy, 2019), http://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Shorter-working-week-final.pdf.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Not only, some heterodox writers argue, is rent asset-based income; it is income associated with the extraction rather than creation of value. The rentier, that is to say, is considered a parasite; asset control enables her to arrogate to herself value created elsewhere. This was very much Ricardo’s view, for example. Today, prominent Ricardians (at least on rent theory), wittingly or otherwise, include Mazzucato and Rutger Bregman, the latter of whom has written vividly of rentiers ‘sucking the rest of us dry’.12 Then there are those who give this parasite– host imagery a particular geographical and geopolitical spin: for the likes of Michael Roberts, many contemporary Western economies, including the UK’s, are rentierist specifically in the sense that they ‘[live] off the productive development of other countries’.13 Such critiques hark back to the work especially of Lenin, who argued in the 1910s that European imperialism had led to the ‘extraordinary growth’ of ‘a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons”, who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness.

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Indeed, output growth began falling just around the time Before the Oil Ran Out hit the shelves in the nation’s bookstores. If the UK economy did not run out of oil, then, it did – as Jack also predicted – run out of steam. There is nothing in the longer historical record to suggest that national growth prospects are likely to improve while the rentier’s grip remains vice-like. As Rutger Bregman has cautioned: ‘One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child’s growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.’4 Needless to say, declining economic growth such as the UK has experienced in recent times puts pressure on all incomes, including household incomes.

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In the 1930s, Keynes, as I noted in Chapter 1, declared that the euthanasia of the rentier of which he dreamed would represent the euthanasia of power – specifically, power to exploit the scarcity-value of capital – that was in his terms ‘cumulative’ (the power of the capitalist class) and ‘oppressive’ (the Oxford English Dictionary’s preferred synonyms are ‘merciless; harsh; exploitative; repressive’). Without wanting to make difficult comparisons between the balance of the political economy of the UK then and now, let us just say that the power of rentier capital is not evidently less cumulative and oppressive today than it was in Keynes’s era. Moreover, as Rutger Bregman has forcefully argued, rentierism is, ‘in essence, a question of power’: That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It’s no different for the modern rentier. He’s got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court.

You Are What You Read
by Jodie Jackson
Published 3 Apr 2019

Leff and Peter Miller The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty by Thomas E. Patterson ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible to write without the wealth of researchers who have gone before me to investigate the impact of the news. I stand on their shoulders in order to share my insights with the world.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Another underwriter is ExxonMobil. Throwing executives, scientists, celebrities, and journalists into the same room “can generate ideas capable of transforming our world,” ExxonMobil gushes. Occasionally, a heretic slips in on the list of invitees. Such was the case with the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who famously skewered the Davos attendees in January 2019 for flying hundreds of carbon-dioxide-spewing private jets into an event “to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet.” He quickly pivoted to the topic of rich people not paying enough taxes, an issue he thought was central to solving a host of society’s problems but, he said, received scant attention at Davos.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT 8. “Turning a Coal Mine into a Diamond” “can generate ideas capable”: ExxonMobil, “Five Big Ideas from the Aspen Ideas Festival,” press release, July 9, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He quickly pivoted to the topic: “This Is Not Rocket Science: Rutger Bregman Tells Davos to Talk About Tax—Video,” Guardian, Jan. 29, 2019. The 2020 World Economic Forum at Davos took place before the global onset of COVID-19. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In June 2019: For a description of the McKinsey partners speaking at Aspen, see “A Festival of Ideas, Shaped by McKinsey Insight” on the McKinsey website, posted July 31, 2019, www.mckinsey.com.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

Golding, on the other hand, believed the civilizing influence of religion is nothing more than a veneer, and that as soon as the pressures of society are removed, humanity reverts to its natural state of savagery. As it turns out, neither story provides an especially accurate portrayal of human nature. In his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman provides an account of what really happened when six boys were shipwrecked on a Polynesian island in the mid-1960s.46 The boys, who were all students at a Christian boarding school, had commandeered a boat to escape the confines of their school and reach Fiji. When hit by a storm, they found themselves lost at sea and were forced to catch rainwater in coconut shells, which they shared equally between them.

…

Dan Sabbagh, “BAE Systems Accused of Being Party to Alleged War Crimes,” The Guardian, December 11, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/11/bae-systems-accused-of-being-party-to-alleged-war-crimes. 40. Graeber, Utopia of Rules. 41. Edward Segal, “Public Trust Increases in Most Businesses and Industries: New Report,” Forbes, January 18, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/01/18/public-trust-increases-in-most-businesses-and-industries-new-report/?sh=6ecdd38c3dd5. 42. Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (New York: Little, Brown, 2020). 43. Martin Wainwright, “Author William Golding Tried to Rape Teenager, Private Papers Show,” The Guardian, August 16, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/16/william-golding-attempted-rape. 44. Bregman, Humankind. 45.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

“It’s Not Your Imagination: Things Are More Expensive Than They Were 10 Years Ago.” CNBC, April 25, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/things-are-more-expensive-than-they-were-10-years-ago.html. Bregman, Rutger. “Poverty Isn’t a Lack of Character; It’s a Lack of Cash.” TED Talks, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash/transcript?language=en. ———. Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek. Translated by Elizabeth Manton. The Correspondent, 2016. Bridgman, Benjamin, Andrew Dugan, Mikhael Lal, Matthew Osborne, and Shaunda Villones.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Wells, 1898 People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Joseph Stiglitz, 2019 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014 Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek, 2014, and Humankind: A Hopeful History, 2019, Rutger Bregman Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, Mark O’Connell, 2020 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, 2011 Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang, 2020 Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark, 2017 The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values?

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Without their input, the book would have been finished in half the time (and would have been a tenth as good): Dave Blakely, ErnstJan Bouter, Leen Breevoort, Marc van der Chijs, Martin Voorzanger, Wassili Bertoen, Erwin Blom, Kees van Nunen, Louise Doorn, Gerd Leonhard, Ajit Jaokar, Paul van Liempt, Jan Fred van Wijnen, Rutger Bregman, Joe Pine II, Anders Hvid, Pepijn Vloemans, Wouter van Noort, Marc Fonteijn, Raymond Perrenet, Bart van de Laak, Pascale Scheurer, Hood Whitson, Nicoletta Iacobacci, Sonal Shah, Michelle LaPierre, Nilofer Merchant, Yonatan Adiri, Vince Daranyi, Jabeen Quadir, VJ Anma, Joel Richman, Kent Langley, Nathalie Trutmann, Gulay Ozkan, James Donnelly, Johnny Walker, Eitan Eliram, Eric Ezechielli, Howard Baskin, Andrew Vaz, Russ Howell, Lawton Langford, Steve Leveen, Diane Francis, Sasha Grujicic and Carin Watson.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Kevin Roose, “In Conversation: Marc Andreessen,” New York (October 19, 2014); Sam Altman, “Technology and Wealth Inequality” (January 28, 2014), blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality. 14. Recent overviews of universal basic income include Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2017), and Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Little, Brown, 2017). 15. Marshall Brain, Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future (2012), marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm; for another perspective on parallels between basic income and venture capital, see Steve Randy Waldman, “VC for the People” (April 16, 2014), interfluidity.com/v2/5066.html. 16.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

“Business Roundtable: Your 2019 Commitment”: “Senator Warren to Business Roundtable: Your 2019 Commitment to ‘Promote an Economy that Serves all Americans’ Was an Empty Publicity Stunt,” Elizabeth Warren, September 17, 2020, https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-to-business-roundtable-your-2019-commitment-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans-was-an-empty-publicity-stunt. “I’m the guy”: David Gelles, “Jeff Immelt Oversaw the Downfall of G.E. Now He’d Like You to Read His Book.,” New York Times, February 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/business/jeff-immelt-general-electric-corner-office.html, and Immelt, interview. “a generation or even more”: Rutger Bregman, “The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?,” The Correspondent, May 14, 2020, https://thecorrespondent.com/466/the-neoliberal-era-is-ending-what-comes-next/61655148676-a00ee89a. INDEX A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

To be modern is a cultural time orientation to the present and toward the future’ (emphasis in the original).142 It’s a nice definition, one that I’m happy to identify with as a ‘modern’ myself. But note that being unbound by the past isn’t the same as defying, ridiculing or measuring oneself against it. And yet this looms large in many writings that celebrate the virtues of the modern. For example, Rutger Bregman tells us that ‘in the past, everything was worse. For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly,’ while Anthony Warner makes the bold and conveniently untestable assertion that ‘every society that has ever existed would eagerly swap their lives with someone living in the developed world today’.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

See also John Danaher, “Libertarianism and the Basic Income (Part One),” Philosophical Disquisitions, December 17, 2013; Noah Gordon, “The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income,” Atlantic, August 2014. 50.Mike Alberti and Kevin C. Brown. “Guaranteed Income’s Moment in the Sun,” Remapping Debate, April 24, 2013, remappingdebate.org; Rutger Bregman, “Nixon’s Basic Income Plan,” Jacobin, May 5, 2016. 51.Will Grice, “Finland Plans to Give Every Citizen 800 Euros a Month and Scrap Benefits,” Independent, December 6, 2015; Tracy Brown Hamilton, “The Netherlands’ Upcoming Money-for-Nothing Experiment,” Atlantic, June 21, 2016. 52.John Danaher, “Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work?

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

See Karl Marx, “German Ideology,” in Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 132; and Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), especially p. 6. For a more recent take in a somewhat similar vein, see Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017). 14. As the 2018 World Inequality Report chronicles, there is a lot of variation in the degree to which different countries have allowed their citizens to share in the growth of the local economy.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

It’s also worth noting that Belgium does have seven different regional governments that were unaffected. 11. Caitlin Huston, “Uber IPO Prospects May Be Helped by Resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick,” MarketWatch, last modified June 22, 2017, www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-ipo-prospects-may-be-helped-by-resignation-of-ceo-travis-kalanick-2017-06-21. 12. Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (New York: Little, Brown, 2017). Even police strikes rarely have the anticipated effects. In December 2015 New York police carried out a work stoppage for all but “urgent” police business; there was no effect on crime rate, but city revenues plummeted owing to the lack of fines for traffic violation and similar infractions.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

They are all worth taking a look at if you are interested in housing, wealth, class, compassion as a political resource and the origins of Britain’s welfare state. John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: Verso, 2018) Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, tr. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1996; New York: The New Press, 1998) Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition (Penguin, 2021) Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (London: Penguin, 2016) Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845; London: Penguin Classics, 2009) Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London: Macmillan, 1973) Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964) Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2007; revised edition, 2012) bell hooks, ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ in Undoing Place?

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

And I want to acknowledge those who had a particularly profound impact on my broader thinking about longtermism, especially Toby Ord, Holden Karnofsky, Carl Shulman, and Hilary Greaves. Their influence on me is so thoroughgoing that it permeates every chapter. I got particularly helpful advice on writing style and structure from Brian Christian, Dylan Matthews, Jim Davies, Larissa MacFarquhar, Rutger Bregman, and Max Roser. I have also benefited immensely from thoughtful and detailed comments on the book from dozens of expert reviewers. This book draws on everything from paleoclimatology to the history of Confucianism. I could not have hoped to do this range of topics justice without feedback and advice from topic experts: Dr Leslie Abrahams (climate change), Dr Wladimir Alonso (animal welfare), Prof.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Its progenitor, Robin Dunbar, provides a useful overview in “Dunbar’s Number: Why My Theory That Humans Can Only Maintain 150 Friendships Has Withstood 30 Years of Scrutiny,” The Conversation, May 12, 2021. 23 “survival of the friendliest”: Survival of the Friendliest, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, 2021. 24 We process that information: Further discussion of these emotions’ uniquely human origins and function in Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman, 2019. 25 “Even though at the time”: “The Binge Breaker,” Bianca Bosker, The Atlantic, November 2016. 26 “that button having a number”: “Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes,” The Daily, a New York Times podcast, August 7, 2020. 27 neural activity flares: Unless noted otherwise, all references to the neurological effects of social media use in this section draw from the research of Dar Meshi, a Michigan State University neuroscientist.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

a sudden $400 expense: See the Federal Reserve’s “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2016”: https://www.federalreserve.gov/​consumers­communities/​shed.htm. Nixon approved a proposal: “Floor Under Income,” New York Times, December 25, 1973, http://www.nytimes.com/​1973/​12/​25/​archives/​floor-under-income.html?_r=0. See also Rutger Bregman, “Nixon’s Basic Income Plan,” Jacobin, May 5, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/​2016/​05/​richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/. attacking “welfare queens”: See this 1976 article in The New York Times discussing the issue of “welfare queens” in the election: http://www.nytimes.com/​1976/​02/​15/​archives/​welfare-queen-becomes-issue-in-reagan-campaign-hitting-a-nerve-now.html.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Meanwhile, that productivity should also provide goods at ever-lower costs, increasing the value of the citizen’s dividend. This is the world of prosperity that Keynes envisioned for his grandchildren. How might we pay for a universal basic income? The entire amount the United States federal government spends on social welfare programs—$668 billion in 2014—would amount to only $2,400 per person. Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists, a book about basic income, divides the pie differently, pointing out that rather than providing an income to those who don’t need it, we could use a negative income tax to give cash only to those who actually need it. Writers Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker calculated that in 2013, the amount needed to bring all of the Americans living below the poverty line up to at least its level would cost only $175 billion.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

See, for example, Gupta 2014 for arguments relating in parÂ�ticÂ�uÂ�lar to India; Matthews 2014 on the basis of a controlled experiment in Mexico; Cunha 2014; Salemi-Â�Isfahani 2014:9 in connection with Iran’s cash transfer program; and Hanlon et al. 2010 for a forceful plea on the basis of a broad overview. 22. Even food vouchers can have a depressing effect on the local economy if the latter is largely informal, and hence at a disadvantage in being recognized as entitled to accept earmarked vouchers. 23. As Rutger Bregman (2016: 58) puts it: “The Â�great Â�thing about money is that Â�people can use it to buy Â�things they need, instead of Â�things that self-Â�appointed experts think they need.” By contrast, Paul and Percival Goodman (1947/1960: 200) argued for in-Â�kind provision. They believed each citizen should be entitled Â�free of charge to “food, uniform clothing, group accommodation outside metropolitan areas, medical serÂ�vice, transportation” and offered a freedom-Â�based argument for it: “If freedom is the aim, everyÂ�thing beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more imporÂ�tant to limit poÂ�litiÂ�cal intervention than to raise the standard of living.” 252 NOTES TO PAGES 13–15 24.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

A legend involving Ford’s son, Henry Ford II, illustrates the same lesson with respect to automation. While showing union leader Walter Reuther around a mechanized factory in the 1960s, Ford reportedly joked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Reuther reportedly answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” Rutger Bregman, “Free Money Might Be the Best Way to End Poverty,” Washington Post, December 29, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html?utm_term=.065017746030. even week to week: The average payday borrower’s annual household income is just $30,000.