🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Although the world is currently the richest it’s ever been, people and societies seem to be focussed on the wrong things: for example, extracting even more money out of each other and being pessimistic about our future, while forgetting the important things which unfortunately don’t directly create more wealth.
- Many experiments with handing out a universal basic income have shown it to lead to more happiness, decreases in the value of current “bullshit jobs” and increases of the jobs which actually help society; it makes people healthier and is even more economic, because e.g. homeless people currently cost the tax payer actually more than just providing them with a modest home and counseling for free.
- We hold so many deep convictions in us which are long proven to be wrong, such as that massive immigration only ever creates problems when the contrary is the reality and it always leads to a growing economy in the long term, or that everyone would just be lazy all the time when given free money when countless studies have shown otherwise, or that nothing in our system can be fundamentally changed; to keep an open mind and stay optimistic and try bold new ideas is the only way to a better world.
🎨 Impressions
I came across this book when searching for more information on the topic of a universal basic income. From time to time, the idea had already taken up shop in my brain, may it be due to popular but apparently short-lived movements in the US like that of Andrew Yang, a candidate for the presidency in 2020, or through a current campaign in my hometown to make a larger experiment happen right here.
The arguments have often been persuading enough in the beginning and the idea sounds intriguing, but usually at some point someone loudly yells: “But who’s going to pay for all of that?!”
For reasons of complexity, no single person can ever fully understand the financial systems most modern societies have maneuvered themselves into, but once you get a grasp of how the seemingly simple thing that money is actually works, it’s getting a whole lot easier. Books such as Sapiens by Harari help a lot. But I ventured here from reading the book “Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber, who explains in detail how such a huge number of our current professional occupations don’t serve any real purpose but still exist. People are putting numbers from one spreadsheet into the other for decades but no one ever looks at those. Corporate lawyers spending years finding minuscule problems in contracts which are never really applied. President Obama once even gave the reason that the healthcare system couldn’t be simplified when he said that if he did, he’d have to fire around three million people whose jobs would immediately become superfluous. It’s a mess. Around 37% of people think their own position is not important in any way, and it’s not just because they are tiny cogs in a huge machine they can’t comprehend.
This leads to all sorts of problems, those of the mental health kind among them. At the same time, the smartest minds of our generation are currently occupied trying to get people to click more ads in some social media software or games.
And then we’ve got the AI revolution which we’re currently witnessing.
It all seems like the move towards a universal basic income is inevitable unless we favor an uncontrollable collapse of the job market paired with another mental health catastrophe and massive humanitarian costs.
That’s why I picked up the book. I was skeptical at first, too. Those main counter-arguments were mine, too. Where would the money come from? And wouldn’t everyone just start lying on the couch and doing nothing with their lives when given free money?
Bregman, a Dutchman, doesn’t directly answer those questions, and I think that’s a smart move. He first explains the idea, its history, the outcome of several experiments, and ends on a strong chapter about the importance of radical new ideas as opposed to a stagnation in the thought process of a society. The more I read, the more I liked the book. By the end of it, I was convinced everyone should read it.
But just to help you get into it: The money thing is actually straight forward. Currently, money is just created by governments with no basis underneath it except the hope that everyone else will think highly enough of that particular state to justify printing the amount of money. Printing too much or too little creates problems, but finding a balance is possible. What people then often forget is that it’s not just extra money that’s suddenly floating around. People having the money has consequences. They will want to spend the money. That creates demand for goods and services, increasing the economy. Staying on the couch isn’t that attractive if you’ve got the opportunity to create or provide additional value to others and get money in exchange – but on your own terms, not because you have to.
Of course, the consequences can never be correctly anticipated when applying a universal basic income on the grand scale since we’re living in a type 2 chaotic system that is our economy, but without trying we will never find out what might improve the situation.
There are several tales of how UBI has been tried by different entities across many different countries. The vast majority of the experiments provided information that made it look like a good idea. One particularly funny story is how US-president Richard Nixon actually twice tried to get a universal basic income into legislation but failed at the senate. A Republican! It was called the “Family Assistance Plan”. This goes to show that many of the classically “left” and “right” ideas are interchangeable and just subject to a current political climate. That’s one of the topics in “What’s our Problem?” by Tim Urban. We need to start to talk about the ideas more and not become all tribalistic about it immediately.
Here are a few more points that Bregman makes:
- To the topic of unnecessary jobs, he tells a story about a general strike of the garbage collection workers in Manhattan in 1968 and contrasts it with a strike of large parts of the financial industry in Ireland in 1970. Can you imagine which one had a more significant impact? Or, which jobs turned out to be useful and which weren’t? Yes, New York declared a state of emergency after just a few days, while in Ireland people just adapted and months later everything was still fine.
- The argument that poor people are lazy or dumb is largely false. Poor people are just one thing, poor. A lack of money creates constant stress to any person, leading to a scarcity mindset which clouds the mind and impedes the decision making process. When given money and guaranteed stability, the decisions become much better.
- The essential jobs which nobody really wants to do would need to get paid a lot better to remain attractive. This is great because it more aligns the jobs’ usefulness with the salary. Paying a medical nurse or a garbage collector a bigger salary seems like the right thing to do.
- Homeless people cost the tax payer a lot of money. Up to 40,000 USD per year and person, depending on the location. That’s mainly police work, medical aid and the like. Several experiments have shown that just providing a homeless person with a steady free income and counseling solves the problems and costs a lot less. And by the way, the usage of alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, never increased in these situations.
- Borders don’t solve problems. I was fascinated to learn that the current system with passports, strict border controls, and restrictions on where in the world we are allowed to reside and work is just about a hundred years old! Before, you could just go anywhere, settle down and do your thing, basically. This is just a side story in the book, but our current fearful look on immigration is quite misguided, too, apparently. People wanting to come to your country is great, people leaving your country is what you should be concerned about. Historically, huge immigration influxes have never brought any country down to collapse, but actually helped the economy grow over the long term. Short term problems such as a lack of housing were of course of concern, but prejudices like an increase of crime and the disappearance of a sense of community could not be proven so far. Which means, the problems are just in the heads of people. There are estimates that removing borders would increase the worldwide gross product by over 140 percent. Access to any job market for anyone would have huge benefits. I hadn’t thought about that before in this way.
Towards the end, Bregman makes the case that it’s more about talking about big ideas again then it is about this particular one, or these ones. He feels that there’s a note resignation in our western world, that nothing can really be changed, and I agree. This has to change. It’s time for more bold experiments. Many of the great things we currently have are based on some idea that once used to be considered crazy.
“But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.”
🍀 How the Book Changed Me
- The book convinced me to be pro universal basic income. I was skeptical at first, but now I think it’s a bold idea that we should try on more and more large scales. I’m keen to find out what the consequences are while I hope they outweigh the negatives.
- I haven’t been anti-immigration before reading this book, but now I’m pro-immigration and not just indifferent to it. Maybe that’s an area where I could help people in the future.
📔 Highlights
1 The Return of Utopia
Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”
As people and societies get progressively older they become accustomed to the status quo, in which liberty can become a prison, and the truth can become lies.
Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all? And why is more than 60% of your income dependent on the country where you just happen to have been born?
We see it in journalism, which portrays politics as a game in which the stakes are not ideals, but careers. We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate. In fact, the twenty-first-century university resembles nothing so much as a factory, as do our hospitals, schools, and TV networks. What counts is achieving targets. Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity.
In the 1950s, only 12% of young adults agreed with the statement “I’m a very special person.” Today 80% do, when the fact is, we’re all becoming more and more alike. We all read the same bestsellers, watch the same blockbusters, and sport the same sneakers.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” a former math whiz at Facebook recently lamented.
Without all those wide-eyed dreamers down through the ages, we would all still be poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. Without utopia, we are lost.
2 Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone
Already, research has correlated unconditional cash disbursements with reductions in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and truancy, and with improved school performance, economic growth, and gender equality.
“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.”
[After one particular experiment with a universal basic income, ] The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health. A basic income, evidently, gave women too much independence. Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.
There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people actually want to work, whether they need to or not. In fact, not having a job makes us deeply unhappy. One of the perks of a basic income is that it would free the poor from the welfare trap and spur them to seek a paid job with true opportunities for growth and advancement. Since basic income is unconditional, and will not be taken away or reduced in the event of gainful employment, their circumstances can only improve.
3 The End of Poverty
Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out the window. “Scarcity consumes you,” Shafir explains. “You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.”
You might imagine that all the rules and paperwork serve to put off those who aren’t genuinely needy. But in fact, it works the other way around: The poor – those whose bandwidth is already overtaxed, whose need is greatest – are the least likely to ask Uncle Sam for help.
the “psychosocial consequences” are such that people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them. This undercuts the quality of relationships (manifested in a distrust of strangers and status anxiety, for example). The resulting stress, in turn, is a major determinant of illness and chronic health problems.
Perhaps the most fascinating finding, however, is that even rich people suffer when inequality becomes too great. They, too, become more prone to depression, suspicion, and myriad other social difficulties.
By now we’ve learned that wealth begets more wealth, whether you’re talking about people or about nations. Henry Ford knew it and that’s why he gave his employees a hefty raise in 1914; how else would they ever be able to afford his cars?
State economists calculated that a drifter living on the street cost the government $16,670 a year (for social services, police, courts, etc.). An apartment plus professional counseling, by contrast, cost a modest $11,000.30
4 The Bizarre Tale of President Nixon and His Basic Income Bill
Richard Nixon was not the most likely candidate to pursue Thomas More’s old utopian dream, but then history sometimes has a strange sense of humor. The same man who was forced to resign after the Watergate scandal in 1974 had been on the verge, in 1969, of enacting an unconditional income for all poor families.
Even Karl Marx used it as the basis for his condemnation of the Speenhamland system in his magnum opus Das Kapital (1867) thirty years later. Poor relief, he said, was a tactic employers used to keep wages as low as possible by putting the onus on local government.
“Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.”
No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, to the unemployed, who haven’t developed their “employment skills” or simply haven’t given it their best shot.
Whereas employees are expected to demonstrate their strengths, social services expects claimants to demonstrate their shortcomings; to prove over and over that an illness is sufficiently debilitating, that a depression is sufficiently bleak, and that chances of getting hired are sufficiently slim. Otherwise your benefits are cut.
If there’s one thing that we capitalists have in common with the communists of old, it’s a pathological obsession with gainful employment. Just as Soviet-era shops employed “three clerks to sell a piece of meat,” we’ll force benefit claimants to perform pointless tasks, even if it bankrupts us.
5 New Figures for a New Era
If a businesswoman marries her cleaner, the GDP dips when her hubby trades his job for unpaid housework.
Adding all this unpaid work would expand the economy by anywhere from 37% (in Hungary) to 74% (in the UK). However, as the economist Diane Coyle notes, “generally official statistical agencies have never bothered – perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women.”
If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.
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.
The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of car mechanics.
Take Adam Smith, father of modern economics, who believed that the wealth of nations was founded not only on agriculture, but also on manufacturing. The entire service economy, by contrast – a sector that spans everything from entertainers to lawyers and constitutes roughly two-thirds of the modern economy – Smith argued “adds to the value of nothing.”
To calculate the GDP, numerous data points have to be linked together and hundreds of wholly subjective choices made regarding what to count and what to ignore.
Not only that, we need a good dose of irritation, frustration, and discontent to propel us forward. If the Land of Plenty is a place where everybody is happy, then it’s also a place steeped in apathy.
When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors.
“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.” Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.
6 A Fifteen-Hour Workweek
When in 1926 a group of thirty-two prominent American businessmen were asked how they felt about a shorter workweek, a grand total of two thought the idea had merit. According to the other thirty, more free time would only result in higher crime rates, debts, and degeneration.
Whereas couples worked a combined total of five to six days a week in the 1950s, nowadays it’s closer to seven or eight. At the same time, parenting has become a much more time-intensive job. Research suggests that across national boundaries, parents are dedicating substantially more time to their children.
What Ford, Kellogg, and Heath had all discovered is that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand.
We’re even willing to trade in precious purchasing power for more free time. It is worth noting, however, that the line between work and leisure has blurred in recent times. Work is now often perceived as a kind of hobby, or even as the very crux of our identity.
Stable and meaningful work plays a crucial part in every life well lived. By the same token, forced leisure – getting fired – is a catastrophe. Psychologists have demonstrated that protracted unemployment has a greater impact on well-being than divorce or the loss of a loved one.
Not coincidentally, the countries with the shortest workweeks also have the largest number of volunteers and the most social capital.
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
7 Why It Doesn’t Pay to Be a Banker
Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow. Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all.
David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”
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.)
If the post-war era gave us fabulous inventions like the washing machine, the refrigerator, the space shuttle, and the pill, lately it’s been slightly improved iterations of the same phone we bought a couple years ago. In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate.
8 Race Against the Machine
The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.
“Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs.”
Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.
For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.
9 Beyond the Gates of the Land of Plenty
Four different studies have shown that, depending on the level of movement in the global labor market, the estimated growth in “gross worldwide product” would be in the range of 67% to 147% [when all international borders would open]. Effectively, open borders would make the whole world twice as rich.
Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders. Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history.
Even as the number of illegal immigrants tripled between 1990 and 2013 to over eleven million, the crime rate reversed dramatically.
A later retrospective analysis of ninety studies found no correlation whatsoever between diversity and social cohesion.
there’s no evidence that immigrants are more likely to apply for assistance than native citizens. Nor do countries with a strong social safety net attract a higher share of immigrants. In reality, if you correct for income and job status, immigrants actually take less advantage of public assistance.
One thing is certain however: If we want to make the world a better place, there’s no getting around migration. Even just cracking the door would help. If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world’s poor would have $305 billion more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank. That’s the combined total of all development aid – times three.
10 How Ideas Change the World
“Cognitive dissonance,” he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.
One factor that certainly is not involved is stupidity. Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody. After all, an education gives you tools to defend your opinions.
In the preface to his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom, he wrote that it is the duty of thinkers to keep offering alternatives. Ideas that seem “politically impossible” today may one day become “politically inevitable.”
Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. “Indeed,” wrote Keynes, “the world is ruled by little else.”
Epilogue
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. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.
And, too often, it seems as if those on the left actually like losing. As if all the failure, the doom, and the atrocities mainly serve to prove they were right all along.
Stop for a moment to ponder the billions of tax dollars being pumped into training society’s best brains, all so they can learn how to exploit other people as efficiently as possible, and it makes your head spin.
The biggest regret was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Number two: “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”
It took a while before I realized that my so-called lack of realism had little to do with actual flaws in my reasoning. Calling my ideas “unrealistic” was simply a shorthand way of saying they didn’t fit the status quo. And the best way to shut people up is to make them feel silly.
they see the world as a corrupt and greedy place. My answer to them was this: turn off the TV, look around you, and organize. Most people really do have their hearts in the right place. And second, my advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what. If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible.
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