Books/Utopia for Realists
Subtitle: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek
The author starts the book by making a case for the idea of a utopia and how the imagination of people keeps shifting over time leading to newer versions of utopia in each age. The medieval person's utopia was simply the land of the plenty where there's enough to eat. Most of the western world can already be classified as the Land of the Plenty.
As the subtitle suggests, the book makes the case that a utopia fit for our times should have three things:
- Universal Basic Income
- Open Borders
- 15-hour Workweek
In our Land of the Plenty, though our productivity has increased a lot, we are still very poor in time. Increased productivity has led to the notion that time is money, and we kept chasing after money that can buy us more stuff and losing time in the process.
The author challenges the notion that people should work to make a living. A farmer from 1300s worked only half as much (1500 hours) as compared to a worker from the industrial revolution.
GDP was created in wartime to measure a particular statistic which can correlate with how much an economy is growing, where economy is itself an abstract concept. It implies making great sacrifices to personal happiness and well-being to help the country survive the war. Applying this wartime tactic in peace time is a major source of unhappiness to entire populations. But GDP is unfortunately an easy but unhelpful statistic to measure, just like BMI is.The creator of GDP regretted creating it. We should instead focus on measuring things like human happiness and quality of living in a country.
