Utopia for Realists How We Can Build the Ideal World

Rutger Bregman points out wonderfully in his book you took for realists that people that come to the US for example first generation migrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native population the same is true for their children as well in the US and the same stories in the UK like they're less likely to be filling up our prisons

I'm thinking of like Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists, right, where he talks about a 15-hour work week or he talks about open borders or universal basic income.

my very first book was called Utopia for Realists and it was about all these crazy ideas like, can't we just abolish poverty by giving everyone money, you know, which is called a universal basic income. Can't we abolish all borders around the globe?

Utopia for Realists is the book that you wrote and it's come back into prominence again because it's just like a fun read.

You talk about all of these ideas and how they could actually be implemented, which is interesting. It's not just the ideas. Universal basic income, open borders, 15-hour work week.

This is like Freddy Krueger for a GOP person. This is like nightmare stories. That's what this is.

But I mean, it's also true that if I look at a debate, right, Medicare for all, for example, America is the only country in the rich world that doesn't have it. And still, it has the most expensive healthcare system and life expectancy is going down. So, yeah, that seems pretty ridiculous.

if you go back to the 60s, almost everyone believed, all the experts believed that some form of basic income was going to be implemented in the United States.

In your book Utopia for Realists, you advocate for the implementation of universal bake it, UBI as a means to reduce poverty and address social equality. Give us your pitch on UBI.

In my book Utopia for Realists, I basically looked at all the empirical evidence that we've gathered since the 1970s.

So I think it's a fairly common idea in places like Silicon Valley that you need the power to say no or they call it I think fuck you money. It's very important if you want to be free in this world and if you want to be creative in this world and that's what basic income would be for the masses. So it would be venture capital for the people.

So what you see time and again is that health costs go down, crime goes down, kids do better in school and some of the worries that people have, oh why everyone stopped working for example or will these people spend it all on tobacco or gamble it away, that's just not the case at all.

Maybe you shouldn't be so arrogant that you think you know what the man has to do with his life you know maybe just give the man some money so that he can decide for himself what he wants to do instead of rely on some self-appointed expert.