Utopia for Realists

Let’s rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago.24 A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders … They’re all crazy dreams – but for how much longer?

Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems.

These are my brothers and sisters,” he said at a meeting in Casper, Wyoming. “When they’re hurting, we’re hurting as a community. We’re all connected.”

Now it’s up to us to reconsider these old questions. What is growth? What is progress? Or even more fundamentally, what makes life truly worthwhile?

The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessi

poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.

Remember, making money without creating anything of value isn’t easy. For starters, you have to memorize some very important-sounding but meaningless jargon. (Crucial when attending strategic trans-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstorm the value add-on co-creation in the network society.)

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.