Utopia for Realists summary

Life was tough for Bernard Omondi. Working in a stone quarry in impoverished western Kenya, he was earning $2 a day – barely enough to get by. But life got a lot better when the charity GiveDirectly gave him and others in his village a one-off payment of $500, with no strings attached. Bernard used his windfall to purchase a motorcycle. Months later, he was earning $6 to $9 a day as a motorbike taxi driver. The money had transformed Bernard’s life. 

GiveDirectly follows a simple principle: Cash-poor people know better than anyone else what they need. Therefore, the best way to help them is to give them money. Cold, unconditional, no-strings-attached cash that they can use as they see fit. 

Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is a scheme in which everyone receives just enough money to live on. It’s tax-funded, given unconditionally, and doesn’t require the recipient to work. It’s not a new idea – something very much like it was almost introduced in the United States by an unlikely supporter. 

Before his disgrace, President Richard Nixon planned on giving every family $1,600 a year, or $10,000 in today’s money. It would be, he argued, the most significant social legislation in US history. In the end, facing political opposition in Congress, Nixon abandoned the idea. It seemed thinkable then, but UBI is certainly possible now. 

To listen to politicians or economic commentators, you’d think that gross domestic product, or GDP, was a wholly reliable measure of a nation’s well-being. In reality, though, GDP should no longer be trusted as a yardstick for a nation’s progress. 

What is GDP? Well, it’s the sum of goods and services produced in a country, adjusted for things like seasonal variations and inflation. So far, so good. But there are a few fundamental problems with it.

In summer 1930, while giving a lecture in Madrid, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a striking prediction: by 2030, vast economic growth would mean a 15-hour workweek. Well, Keynes was right about rocketing economic growth, but why was he wrong about us working fewer hours? 

Economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth century did lead to some reductions in working hours. The capitalist-to-his-bones car manufacturer, Henry Ford, discovered that shortening his employees’ workweek increased their productivity. He happily told journalists that more leisure was a “cold business fact,” offering effective, rested workers who also had enough leisure time to buy and use his cars. And Ford wasn’t alone. By the 1960s, the Rand Corporation think-tank foresaw a future economy in which just 2 percent of people needed to work to meet all of society’s needs. 

In February 1968, 7,000 angry sanitation workers gathered in New York in response to failed pay negotiations. As one garbageman said, they were fed up of people treating them like dirt. They were going on strike. 

In Ireland, in May 1970, the country’s bank employees went on strike following lengthy but unsuccessful wage negotiations.

In the early nineteenth century, English factory owner William Cartwright introduced a new type of loom. Each machine replaced the jobs of four skilled weavers. In the following months, unemployed workers formed a radical faction intent on destroying machinery. Machines, said one rebel named William Leadbetter, “will be the destruction of the universe.” The group called themselves the Luddites.

Throughout history, people have warned of the impact of machines on jobs. But today, most people would say that the Luddites and other fear-mongers got it wrong. After all, we aren’t all unemployed. Nonetheless, there are reasons to be more worried than ever before about the impact of technology on jobs. 

It seems possible that the Luddites’ anti-technology fears weren’t wrong, though perhaps just a little premature; maybe we really are doomed to be beaten in our race against the machine. After all, we may be about to reach a tipping point in which developments in computing power and artificial intelligence radically change everything. 

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil ardently believes that computers will be as smart as people by 2029 and that by 2045 they may be a billion times more intelligent than all human brains together. Now, Kurzweil is known for his wildness as much as his genius. But we should be wary of dismissing his predictions, just as we would have been wrong to dismiss Gordon Moore’s analysis of computing progression back in the 1960s. 

Imagine there was a single measure that wouldn’t just ameliorate poverty but eradicate it? And imagine that measure would make all of us richer, as well? Surely we’d take it, right?

Well, unfortunately, we probably wouldn’t. Not right now. Because that measure is to open all borders.