Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

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

“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.

the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.

All we care about is “resolving problems,” as though politics could be outsourced to management consultants.

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

Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.

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.

The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “The political right is afraid people will stop working,” laments Professor Forget in Canada, “and the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices.”

Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.