![]() His account of the Speenhamland welfare system is particularly misleading. I only looked up a few of the book’s references, but I saw enough to make me question whether the author was always being entirely candid. The risible scatterplots of The Spirit Level don’t belong in a book aimed at ‘realists’ and it would have taken Bregman only a few minutes to fact-check the old myth about Henry Ford giving his workers a pay rise so that they could buy his cars (that wasn’t his reason and his workers wouldn’t have been able to afford one anyway). Research by Robert Putnam and others which suggests that diversity undermines social cohesion is described by Bregman as having being ‘debunked’ so thoroughly that it ‘crumbles to dust’ but the studies he cites do not deliver any such killer blow, including a meta-analysis that largely confirms Putnam’s findings from the USA. For example, an absurd report from the New Economics Foundation is cited as evidence that advertising executives destroy £7 for every £1 they earn. When unfavourable evidence suggests that giving away ‘free money’ can create unintended consequences or simply not work, he is quick to explain it away but his critical faculties go to sleep when evidence supports his priors. But as he makes his case, there is a creeping suspicion that the evidence is not as strong as he implies. ![]() There is much to be said for this and Bregman claims to have a good deal of evidence to back it up. Give people the security of a basic income and you’ll be surprised by how few of them fritter it away. ![]() Give homeless people a lump sum with no questions asked, he says, and you’ll be surprised how quickly they get back on their feet. It is the stress of being poor that leads people to make bad decisions as much as it is bad decision-making that makes them poor. ![]() Citing some illuminating real world experiments, Bregman makes a compelling case for giving poor people money rather than setting up elaborate poverty-reduction schemes. The extraordinary, unprecedented rise of economic prosperity and all its attendant benefits in recent generations cannot be lauded too often and Bregman pays fitting tribute before turning on a sixpence to discuss the problems that have turned our ‘Land of Plenty’ into a ‘dystopia’: anxiety, narcissism, boredom, apathy and – above all – the inability of his generation to come up with a vision of where society should go next (he is 28).īregman’s answer to this sense of purposelessness is to propose three grand schemes, starting with a guaranteed income for all. The book begins with an invigorating summary of the benefits of free trade and globalisation which starts where Johan Norberg’s excellent Progress left off. If you have studied any of these ideas before and are sceptical, Bregman’s analysis is unlikely to convince you, but there is enough original material to give most readers something to think about. Bregman’s passion for the basic income, in particular, is beyond doubt although it sometimes comes at the expense of objectivity. It is good to see them making waves on the centre-left. At least two of these proposals have been of longstanding interest to libertarians. ![]() First published in the Netherlands in 2014 and now republished in English with a retina-burning, bright orange jacket, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists has become an international bestseller thanks to three big ideas: open borders, a basic income and a shorter working week. ![]()
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