Download Utopia for Realists How We Can Build the Ideal World Audible Audio Edition Rutger Bregman Peter Noble Hachette Audio Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 6 hours and 34 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Hachette Audio Audible.com Release Date August 11, 2017 Language English, English ASIN B074PZ6GDD

Utopia for Realists How We Can Build the Ideal World Audible Audio Edition Rutger Bregman Peter Noble Hachette Audio Books Reviews

• Utopia For Realists is a Left manifesto. It explores three policies guaranteed to enrage right wingers a guaranteed income, a shorter work week and open borders. Rutger Bregman does it with splendid panache. The book is a totally positive, upbeat read – most unusual for a defensive, defeatist Left. The studies and the facts are all there. Deny them at your peril, he seems to say.
  
  To appreciate and enjoy Utopia For Realists, you must buy into the initial premise that our problem is we can’t come up with anything better than the way things are now. We have run out of goals. We have run out of ideas. We are all about cutting back, servicing less, and ignoring various elephants in the room, like automation overloading us with leisure time. Western society is so wealthy in historic terms that we don’t realize we have reached Utopia. Even at our worst, we are infinitely better off than our forebears. What we need now is a new Utopia to aim for.
  
  Guaranteed income sounds impossibly expensive, but everywhere it has been tried – dozens of places - it has worked spectacularly. For one thing, every dollar spent saves three in less supervision of beneficiaries (eg. Police and court services, pointless workshops, training sessions and reports on everyone all the time). For another, the poor don’t drink away the income; they hang onto it dearly, measuring it out only as needed for the biggest impact. Poverty is not an attitude; it is a shortage of cash.
  
  Two hundred years ago, we worked 70 hour weeks with no days off. And we were miserable. Today, we can be miserable with 40 hour weeks, two days off and 2-5 weeks’ vacation. Soon, we must face the reality of 15 hour weeks, because artificial intelligence will pick up where automated looms, assembly lines and robots have left off. We can massage it into a Utopia, or let it destroy our fabric. Our choice, but we need to start acting now.
  
  Borders prevent development and trade. Mexicans used to return from the USA at the rate of 85%. Now they have to stay put. Finding new markets or even just work is enlarged with a larger territory. Artificially compartmentalizing everyone is stultifying. Economically, politically, and socially. Passports and visas – a totally artificial construct recently invented, benefitting no one.
  
  Bregman doesn’t get into the self-imposed need for growth, though he does criticize the concepts of GNP/GDP. He says governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.
  
  He ends with sound advice for the Left stop caving to right wing dogma. You have access to dramatic facts. Use them. There are gigantic, proven solutions waiting to be implemented if only someone would sponsor them. He points out that the accepted issues of the day, like voting by women, same sex marriage and abolition of slavery were outrageously radical and completely unacceptable just a few years ago. So be impossible and have a thick skin.
  
  David Wineberg
• While the ideas of universal basic income, vast social safety-nets, and a 15 hour work-week are attractive and romantic, they are unrealistic and ill-conceived.
  
  The immediate, fundamental problem with UBI is that it will create soaring inflation within the broader economy. Those that support the idea say that it will only be dollars already in circulation that are "redistributed", and that new money won't be printed on a large-scale. But printing money is not the only cause of inflation.
  
  There is a concept called "velocity of money", which is the turnover of money within the economy. UBI greatly increases velocity, and economies that have a higher velocity of money relative to others tend to be further along in the business cycle and have a higher rate of inflation. Likewise, as the modern economy expands, we can expect a larger money supply (M1 & M2) , as the printing of money isn't going to be curtailed anytime soon. Combine these two elements and you have a huge spike in inflation, which erodes purchasing power, and ultimately impacts quality-of-life.
  
  So a poor family gets an infusion of cash through UBI, but then discovers that a gallon of milk that cost $4 last year, now costs $9. The monthly train pass went from $50 to $120.
  
  With UBI, more people have money that they didn't before, and the lower-middle-class, who are not savers, and have high time-preference, will spend it, thus greatly increasing velocity of money, and therefore contributing to inflation.
  
  Aside from this, there are other obvious objections to be made to UBI and a 15 hour work-week. Generally speaking, people like to work--most men don't think sitting around watching reruns on tv is rewarding, vs. starting a business, working hard, launching new projects. UBI encourages indolence.
  
  The less people work, the lower the productivity of the country. Automation and technology can only do so much. The lower the GDP, the less tax revenue. The less tax revenue, the less there is to handout in UBI.
  
  And when we speak of taxes, it will be wealthy entrepreneurs, the upper-middle-class, etc. paying for these social programs and UBI. Faced with soaring taxes, the rich will engage in tax avoidance (which the author hates). They will do this by utilizing capital gains more, and investing in municipal bonds, etc. If the government retaliates by hiking the capital gains rate up to 40-50%, the rich and upper-middle class will liquidate their stock portfolios and flee the market, leading to a crash. No one is going to take the risks to invest if the IRS is going to take more than half your gains.
  
  If the government decides to tax municipal bonds heavily, the rich will dump their bond portfolios, bankrupting state economies that need to use these bonds to finance their social programs and pensions.
  
  In short, the author displays an astonishing ignorance of basic economic principles. UBI schemes have been launched in the past, and none of them have worked to the degree intended. Many had quite the opposite effect.
  
  Robbing productive people in order to put others on welfare on a grand scale has never worked anywhere.
  
  And the open borders? Please! Combine UBI with open borders and you wreck an industrialized economy within a couple years.
  
  This is leftist nonsense. Avoid.
• IMHO the largest problem we face in the Americas is income equality. Let Fox News scream "class war", the rich have been waging war against the middle class since Reagan. This book touches on this but mostly talks about universal basic income (I'm on board!), a shorter work week (although 15 hrs/wk seems too low) and open borders (I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around it). Other ideas include taxing capital instead of labor and a transaction tax on Wall Street. But let's face it, change cannot come until we remove the money from politics, taking power away from the insanely wealthy, corporations and special interest groups.
• We are obviously in a trap. Many in the rich world are clearly dissatisfied with their lives, and they have no idea what to do about it. Yet by the measure of all previous generations we should be in paradise. As Bregman demonstrates, we are wealthier by a great margin than anyone has been in history.
  
  Bregman's answer to this dilemma is that we need use this wealth to buy ourselves more time and more security, not more stuff. What he is proposing is that we establish a universal basic income. This idea has a surprising and long history. Did you know that Richard Nixon almost succeeded in enacting it in the United States? And the results have been very positive wherever it has been tried. It has been shown to be a much more cost effective solution to homelessness than the current mishmash of programs provided by the middle class homelessness industry, for example.
  
  With the rapid progress of automation, we may not have any other choice but to do this. We are fast approaching an era when a large part of the population have nothing to sell that anyone wants to buy.