Description
Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe’s leading young thinkers shows how we will build an ideal world today.
After working all day at jobs we continuously dislike, we buy things we do not want. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn’t be this way-and in some places it’s not.
Rutger Bregman’s TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. His April 2017 talk continues to make the provocative case, detailing the idea’s 500-year history and even its brief success in a forgotten trial in Manitoba in the 1970s. Nearly a million views later, guaranteed basic income is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It’s just probably the most many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is conceivable today.
Every progressive milestone of civilization-from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy-was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman’s book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can transform a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can actually make the unimaginable inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.