Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
“Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
once there’s enough food on the table, a roof that doesn’t leak, and clean running water to drink, economic growth is no longer a guarantor of welfare.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
I do mean horizons in the plural; conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
“Since men will not be tired in their spare time,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, “they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid.”
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Apparently, in modern capitalism we finance the things we find genuinely fulfilling with… bullshit.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
In fact, the GDP offers pretty much everything a journalist could want: hard figures, issued at regular intervals, and the chance to quote experts.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
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.