With progress on my mind, it seems reasonable to bump this post to the top of the queue.Ezra Klein interviews Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists:
Ezra Klein
At the beginning of the book, you have this great line, “This book isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future, to fling open the windows of our minds.” Why should we be working backwards from utopia?
Rutger Bregman
We know that every milestone of civilization — the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for women — were all utopian fantasies in the past. So the point is to come up with new utopias: visions of a radically better society. It was Oscar Wilde who said, “Progress is the realization of utopias.”
My book was an argument against people who view politics as just another form of technocracy or management. I wanted to say, look, I know that there have been horrible utopias in the 20th century, but we shouldn’t throw it all away because progress is all about the realization of utopias.
Ezra Klein
Before we get into the specifics of your utopias, I want to talk about utopian thinking. What do you need to build a vision of utopia? What, is the Rutger Bregman recipe for constructing your own utopia, whatever that might be?
Rutger Bregman
Every utopian vision starts with the injustices of today. For example, nowadays there are millions of people working in jobs that they don’t really care about. They’re writing reports that no one’s ever going to read or building financial products that only destroy wealth.
So then the question is: How would a society look like where people have actually the freedom to decide for themselves what to make of their lives, where work and play become the same thing? And then you can arrive at different things. You can say, well, we need a radically shorter working week. Maybe we need to implement something like a basic income. But it really starts with: What are the problems you’re facing right now? You’re sitting in the office and you’re just depressed.
Universal basic income:
Ezra Klein
Let’s dig into to some of the dimensions of your utopia. Make the utopian case for universal basic income (UBI).
Rutger Bregman
Universal basic income is all about freedom. That’s the most important argument for it. It’s about the freedom to make your own choices. It’s about the freedom to say “yes” to the things that you want to do, and it’s about the freedom to say “no” to things you don’t like — a boss that harasses you or a wife or husband that you don’t really like anymore. If we move to the details, most people would say it’s a monthly grant enough to pay for your basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, and it’s absolutely unconditional so you can decide for yourself what you want to do with it. [...]
Ezra Klein
[...] This is a disagreement I have, among others, with Andrew Yang. If automation is going to take every job, then UBI doesn’t do all that much for you. If you’re driving a truck making $75,000 a year and the robots took your job and now you get $12,000 or $15,000 UBI, that’s not a good situation.
Whereas, to your point, if the idea is that we should just build society differently — that everybody should have the basics taken care of; that we want people to be able to search for jobs that fit them, and if they can’t find one, you don’t have to work a terrible job in order to eat — that’s always struck me as a much more encouraging vision.
Rutger Bregman
I absolutely agree with you. I think the automation argument is probably the worst argument for basic income out there. We should never underestimate capitalism’s extraordinary ability to come up with new bullshit jobs.
Service jobs:
Ezra Klein
I think this is an important point. I suspect that a lot of what makes a job feel useful or useless to someone is whether or not it involves directly caring for other people. If you’re doing work where you can understand the way it’s making somebody else’s life better, then it is a job of clear utility. The public sector has a lot of care jobs — teachers, sanitation workers, healthcare workers, soldiers. You can really understand what those jobs do, whereas at very high levels of the knowledge economy, sometimes you don’t.
To trace this back to computers, I am very skeptical that computers are going to replace care jobs because I think that we are very good at inventing more care jobs. The analogy I always use here is we have a lot more yoga teachers now than we did a couple of years ago. By the logic of automation, there’s no reason to have all these yoga teachers. You can just go on YouTube and get a video from the best yoga teacher for free. But people go.
It seems to me that the future of our economy is going to be more deeply in service jobs. The question, then, is whether or not we’re able to value them to the degree that we should.
Keynes on the 15-hour workweek:
Ezra Klein
Talk to me about the case for 15-hour work week.
Rutger Bregman
This goes back to a very famous essay by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”* In that essay, Keynes makes two predictions. First, he says we’ll probably be four to eight times lot richer in 2030. And it turns out he was actually more or less right.
The second prediction was that we will use that wealth to start working less because that’s what we had been doing since 1850. So again, he extrapolated into the future and said we’ll probably have a working week of about 15 hours. That sounds crazy now, but it was mainstream back then. Up until the ’60s and the ’70s, almost all the sociologists and philosophers were all talking about the real challenge of the future, which was going to be boredom.
I think what Keynes got wrong is that he imagined that this was a force of economics that we would follow, but it’s actually about real political battles that have to be fought. And [starting] in the 1980s, especially in the US, workers started losing those battles.
What counts as work?
Rutger Bregman
That’s a good point. I think that it has become meaningless to look at paid work alone. People have been spending so much more time on their kids nowadays than 20 to 30 years ago. A stay-at-home mom in the 70s spent less time on her kids than a working mother does now. Is that work? Is that leisure?
Ezra Klein
I understand why those hours end up in these conversations, but I don’t like it. I hate the idea of defining the time we spend with our children as works. Our categories here aren’t great. There are parts of parenting that I would think of as work. Then, there are parts of parenting that I wish I had all the time in the world to do. It seems to me that the difference here is about things that are meaningful and sustaining versus things that are not. The categories are weaker than I think we give them credit for.
Rutger Bregman
Yeah. And if you look at the ideological history of this thing called work, often what we call work is work that contributes towards GDP. Then if you delve into the history of GDP, you find they obviously could have included unpaid work in GDP. They chose not to because mostly women were doing it. So, [GDP] is a highly ideological definition of work that economists chose [in the 1930s], and up until this day, we still use this indicator of economic progress.
Open borders:
Ezra Klein
I want to move us to open borders. Make the case for me.
Rutger Bregman
As I said earlier, your utopia for the future starts with the injustices of today. And I think you can easily make the argument that borders are the biggest source of inequality worldwide. 60 percent of your income is dependent simply on where you were born — something that you didn’t choose.
Most of the arguments we have against immigration — they’ll take our jobs, they’re all lazy, they’re all criminals, they’re all terrorists, etc. — don’t stand up to the data, and many immigration policies nowadays are counterproductive. [For example], if you build higher walls, as the US did in the 70s and 80s when it basically militarized the wall with Mexico, you get more illegal immigrants. Because they still come, but they don’t want to leave anymore because the journey is simply so harsh and difficult.
*Keynes on the 15-hour workweek:
JM Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358-373.
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
I note that for something like a 15-hour workweek to happen we need a major cultural change, not simply to allow it, but to fill the time. It's not at all clear to me how many people raised under current conditions (in the USA for example) would be able to utilize the free time. We now have retirement coaches (as well this) to help people figure out how to fill their time in retirement. Primary and secondary schools have been eliminating the arts and recess and have been doubling-down on teach-to-the-test. That kind of education is not going to produce adults who know how to fulfill themselves though meaningful activities.
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