Gross domestic product (GDP) is attacked by Bregman as an arbitrary set of statistics used by governments to measure what they choose. Image Credit: ( jumbly mamba CC BY SA 2.0) The lesson Bregman draws is that the social contribution of labour needs to be fundamentally reassessed to reflect its true value. In the latter case, the city ground to a halt within a few days of industrial action, while in Ireland, the economy continued to grow without any significant change as the country continued to function normally over several months during the strike. In countries with dominant financial centres, like the UK and the US, this has led to growing and dangerous levels of economic inequality.ĭo capitalism’s wages reflect the value of the work? In one of many well-chosen case studies offered by Bregman, he contrasts the social effects of strikes that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s by bankers in Ireland and garbage men in New York City, respectively. Most people are painfully aware of the worthlessness of the contribution of their work: Bregman cites a poll where 37 per cent of the UK workforce believes their jobs are ‘bullshit’.Ĭapitalism’s spoils, Bregman writes, have therefore become alarmingly skewed away from those who ‘add and create value’ to those who ‘hold value and shift it around’. That’s the dystopia we live in today.īregman cites LSE anthropologist David Graeber’s work on the phenomenon of ‘bullshit jobs’: the fields of marketing, public relations and the array of administrative positions across the public and private sectors. Then we go and cry on a therapist shoulder. As Bregman writes:Ī culture that encourages us to spend money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need, in order to impress people we can’t stand. Dangerously dysfunctional long before the 2007-08 financial crisis, modern capitalism is making us depressed, indebted and spiritually bereft. Utopia for Realists offers a wide-ranging critique of the individualism necessitated by the broken deregulated neoliberal economic model. For Rutger Bregman, a 29-year-old Dutch historian and author of Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There, our arrival at ‘the land of plenty’ means that the most pressing challenge for humanity is moving to a new stage of capitalism and creating a better society for everyone.īregman’s starting point is recognising the flaws within the existing system. Record-high life expectancies, technological advances, military conflicts at historic lows and the unprecedented levels of wealth in developed economies all suggest that we are living through a golden age of humanity. Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There. This is an assured and ambitious book, writes Peter Carrol, that deserves to be widely read. With Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There, Rutger Bregman offers a new blueprint for constructing a better society for all, advocating the implementation of seemingly ‘utopian’ ideas, such as universal basic income, along the way.
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