Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Her ambition, in a nutshell, is to “take the guesswork out of policy-making.”

What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people.

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.

All too often, moreover, the alternative to hiring immigrants is to outsource work to other countries. And that, ironically, does force wages down.

When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.

Apparently, in modern capitalism we finance the things we find genuinely fulfilling with… bullshit.

“randomistas.” These are researchers who have had enough of the intuition, gut feelings, and ideological bickering of ivory-tower scholars about the needs of people struggling in Africa and elsewhere. What the randomistas want is numbers–incontrovertible data to show which aid helps, and which doesn’t.

Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking. Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015)