Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Apparently, in modern capitalism we finance the things we find genuinely fulfilling with… bullshit.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. “Indeed,” wrote Keynes, “the world is ruled by little else.”
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
“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.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
the welfare state has increasingly shifted its focus from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms.
Rutger Bregman • Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
“Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”