Utopia for Realists, Really ?

From ‘Myth of Scarcity’ to Reality of Abundance

From 1820 to today, global per capita income shot up roughly tenfold, and vaccines wiped out diphtheria, polio, and measles. Measured against the medieval fantasy of Cockaigne rivers of wine, flying roast geese modern life (electricity, 24/7 supermarkets, antibiotics) already overshoots the dream. Yet we still think in terms of “not enough.” That scarcity mentality tunnels our attention, chops about thirteen IQ points off our bandwidth, and nudges us toward quick fixes that obscure long-term options.

Universal Basic Income (UBI)

Cash trials show the pattern: in London (2009), thirteen homeless men received £3,000 each, spent on average £800 on IDs, phones, courses and most secured housing within a year. Canada’s Mincome experiment (1974–79) cut hospital admissions by 8.5%, kept teens in school longer, and didn’t reduce work except for new mothers and students. Similar gains turned up in the U.S., India, and Namibia. The idea has an eclectic fan club : Paine, Mill, Bertrand Russell, MLK Jr., Friedman, Jan Tinbergen and nearly made U.S. law via Nixon’s 1969 Family Assistance Plan. The through-line: poverty isn’t a moral failure; it’s a cash shortage. Give money first and autonomy does the rest.

GDP: When the Yardstick Misleads

Simon Kuznets designed GDP in the 1930s to answer a wartime question : how many tanks can we make? Not to gauge well-being. Unpaid care, volunteerism, clean air: all zeroed out. Replacing broken windows or cleaning oil spills perversely raises the total. Banking’s “productivity” ballooned in the 1970s after risk-taking was rebranded as output, fuelling bubbles. Rather than worship a single number, Bregman argues for dashboards like the Genuine Progress Indicator (which adds health and inequality) or the Happy Planet Index (which blends life satisfaction with resource use).

Future of Work & Automation

Keynes predicted a fifteen-hour week by 2030 if productivity gains translated into leisure. Instead, after 1980, wages and productivity uncoupled; hours stagnated in the U.S. and Japan while the Netherlands slid to around twenty-nine hours. Meanwhile “bullshit jobs” roles even insiders feel add no real value proliferate in finance and admin. Moore’s Law still doubles chip power roughly every two years, and AI now handles routine cognitive tasks. Society can either spread those gains via shorter weeks and UBI or let technology widen inequality. Shorter hours deliver higher hourly productivity, lower carbon footprints (less commuting), healthier workers, and narrower gender gaps in unpaid care.

Why Utopian Thinking Matters

Ideas migrate from “unthinkable” to policy once someone dares to say them out loud: Switzerland’s basic-income referendum didn’t pass, but it anchored UBI in public debate. Eduardo Galeano’s line “Utopia is on the horizon… the point is to keep walking” frames utopia as compass, not finish line. A “pragmatism of the ideal” means pilot, measure, and iterate: the homeless-cash study, Dutch four-day weeks, New Zealand’s Living-Wage push all began as “radical.”

Important note: Bregman’s claim is simple, the material tools for a fairer, freer society already exist. The upgrade we need is conceptual drop scarcity thinking, retire warped metrics, ditch forty-hour dogma, and keep expanding what counts as “realistic”.

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. Harper & Row. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press.

Van Parijs, P., & Vanderborght, Y. (2017). Basic income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy. Harvard University Press.

Standing, G. (2017). Basic income: And how we can make it happen. Pelican. Coyle, D. (2014). GDP: A brief but affectionate history. Princeton University Press.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Clarke, A. C. (1962/2013). Profiles of the future: An inquiry into the limits of the possible. RosettaBooks.

Wilde, O. (1891/2001). The soul of man under socialism. In The complete works of Oscar Wilde (pp. xxx–xxx). HarperCollins. (Original essay published 1891) More, T. (1516/2002). Utopia (P. Turner, Trans.). Penguin Classics.

Overton, J. (1990s). The Overton window (policy concept; see Mackinac Center publications—articles, not a single book).

Tinbergen, J. (1956). Economic policy: Principles and design. North-Holland.

Images: Paul Gauguin

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1898

Gauguin wanted to fuse life’s most ordinary moments with metaphysical urgency. He sought origins of cultures, of belief, of self while acknowledging their constructed nature. The result is a paradox: a fabricated paradise meant to reveal “truths” about being human.