Olivia: In 1968, New York City's garbage collectors went on strike. The city, the financial capital of the world, nearly collapsed in nine days under 100,000 tons of filth. Jackson: I can just imagine the smell. A complete nightmare. Olivia: Now, picture this: two years later, in 1970, Ireland's bankers went on strike for six full months. All the banks shut down. Jackson: Okay, that sounds even worse. Economic apocalypse, right? Olivia: You'd think so. But the Irish economy... actually grew. Jackson: Come on. How is that even possible? It makes you wonder what's actually essential. Olivia: That bizarre contrast is at the heart of the book we're diving into today: Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. Jackson: Bregman... he's that young Dutch historian, right? The one who became famous for his TED talk on poverty. It's interesting that a historian is writing a book about the future. Olivia: Exactly! And that's the key. He uses history to show that our current reality isn't inevitable and that ideas once considered insane—like the weekend, or women's right to vote—eventually become common sense. This book was so provocative it actually sparked a national movement for basic income experiments in the Netherlands. Jackson: Wow. So it’s not just theory, it’s making waves. Olivia: It’s all about challenging what we think is possible. And Bregman starts with a really counter-intuitive observation about the world we live in right now. He argues we've already achieved a kind of utopia, but it's one that has left us feeling completely empty.

Jackson: A utopia that leaves us empty? That sounds like a contradiction. What does he mean? Olivia: He takes us back to the Middle Ages and asks us to imagine a peasant's wildest dream. What would their perfect world look like? For them, it was a mythical place called the "Land of Cockaigne." Jackson: Cockaigne? Like a land made of cookies and candy? Olivia: Pretty much! In Cockaigne, the rivers flowed with wine, roast geese flew right into your mouth, and pancakes grew on trees. It was a world with no work, no hunger, and no hardship. It was the ultimate paradise of material abundance. Jackson: Okay, I'm on board with the wine rivers. So what's the catch? Olivia: The catch is, Bregman argues, we're living in it. We have fast food 24/7, climate control, cheap flights, and an endless stream of entertainment. For the vast majority of human history, where 94% of people lived in extreme poverty, our modern world would be indistinguishable from the Land of Cockaigne. We've won. Jackson: I can see that. We've made incredible progress. Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Extreme poverty is under 10% for the first time in history. That's a huge deal. Olivia: It's a monumental achievement. But here's the paradox Bregman points to: if we're living in this long-dreamed-of utopia, why are rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout skyrocketing? Why does it feel like something fundamental is missing? Jackson: That’s the question, isn't it? We have all this stuff, all this comfort, but there's a collective sense of aimlessness. We're not striving for anything grander anymore. Olivia: Exactly. The old utopias are running on empty because we've largely achieved their material goals. Politics has become about minor tweaks and technocratic management, not big, inspiring visions for a different kind of society. Bregman quotes the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said, "Humanity is great because it knows itself to be wretched." We used to be acutely aware of our suffering, and that awareness drove us to imagine better worlds. Jackson: And now we're so comfortable we've forgotten how to be wretched? Or at least, we've forgotten how to channel that feeling into a collective goal. It's all individualized now. My anxiety, my burnout, my problem. Olivia: Precisely. We've lost the language for collective dreams. Bregman says we're suffering from a crisis of imagination. We're so focused on individual consumerism and marginal gains that we've stopped asking the big questions about what a truly good life would look like in an age of abundance. Jackson: So if the old utopias are dead, and we're just wandering around this empty paradise... what's a new one look like? Where do we even start? Olivia: Well, this is where Bregman gets really interesting. He says the new utopias aren't about grand, rigid blueprints like the dystopias of the 20th century. They're about asking simple, almost childishly naive questions. And the most powerful one he proposes starts with a simple, radical idea: what if we just gave people free money?

Jackson: Okay, hold on. Free money for everyone? Universal Basic Income. I've heard of it, but it always sounds... well, utopian in the bad sense. Like, completely unrealistic. Wouldn't people just stop working and spend it all on frivolous things? Olivia: That is the number one objection, and it's exactly the prejudice Bregman dismantles with incredible stories and data. He doesn't start with theory; he starts with a real-world experiment that is just jaw-dropping. It took place in London, in 2009. Jackson: I'm listening. What happened in London? Olivia: An aid organization called Broadway decided to try something radical with 13 men who were long-term homeless. These weren't just guys down on their luck; they'd been on the streets of London's financial district for years, some for decades. They were costing the city a fortune in police time, court costs, and social services. Jackson: Right, the system was failing them, and it was expensive. Olivia: Hugely expensive. So the organization decided to stop managing their poverty and just... give them money. They gave each of the 13 men £3,000. No strings attached. No requirements, no caseworkers telling them what to do. They just asked them one question: "What do you think you need?" Jackson: That's a terrifying amount of trust to place in someone who's been on the street for 20 years. My cynical brain immediately goes to the worst-case scenario. Olivia: And that's what makes the results so powerful. The men didn't blow it on drugs or alcohol. They spent it on things you and I take for granted. Things that reconnect you to society. They bought dictionaries, hearing aids, telephones. One man, Simon, who had been addicted to heroin for two decades, used the money to get clean and started taking gardening classes. Jackson: Gardening classes? That's... not what I expected. What was the long-term outcome? Olivia: After a year and a half, seven of the 13 men had a roof over their heads. Two more were about to move into apartments. All of them had taken significant steps toward getting their lives back on track. And the most stunning part? The project cost the city about £50,000 a year, including the social workers' salaries. Just managing their homelessness the old way was costing the city several hundred thousand pounds a year. It was not only more humane, it was dramatically cheaper. Jackson: Wow. That's incredible. It completely flips the script. The assumption is that poverty is a character flaw, a lack of discipline. But this suggests... it's just a lack of cash. Olivia: That's the core insight. Bregman quotes an economist who says, "Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity." When you're constantly stressed about where your next meal is coming from, your mental bandwidth is shot. You can't plan for the future. Giving people a financial floor gives them their brain back. Jackson: Has this been tried on a bigger scale? A small experiment with 13 people is one thing, but a whole town? Olivia: It has. In the 1970s, the entire town of Dauphin, Canada, was part of a huge experiment called "Mincome." Every family was guaranteed a basic income, ensuring no one fell below the poverty line. The project was shut down for political reasons after a few years, and the data was literally locked away in boxes for decades. Jackson: A lost experiment! What did they find when they finally analyzed it? Olivia: A researcher named Evelyn Forget finally got her hands on the data in the 2000s. The results were astounding. Hospitalization rates dropped by 8.5%. High school completion rates went up. Domestic violence and mental health complaints went down. And the big fear—that people would stop working? It barely happened. The only people who worked significantly less were new mothers, who used the time to be with their babies, and teenage boys, who stayed in school longer instead of dropping out to support their families. Jackson: So the things that went down were bad, and the things that went up were good. It's hard to argue with that. It seems like the biggest barrier isn't evidence, but our own deeply ingrained ideas about work, deservingness, and poverty. Olivia: Exactly. And that brings us to the final, and perhaps most important, part of Bregman's argument. These ideas are powerful, the evidence is there. But how does something that sounds so crazy today ever become the common sense of tomorrow?

Jackson: Right. It's a huge leap from a few experiments to global policy. It feels politically impossible. Olivia: It feels impossible now. But Bregman argues that what is politically possible is not fixed. It exists within something called the "Overton Window"—the range of ideas the public is willing to consider and accept. And that window can be moved. Jackson: How? How do you take an idea from the fringe and move it into the mainstream? Olivia: Bregman uses a fascinating, and for some, a chilling, historical example: the rise of neoliberalism. After World War II, the ideas of free-market fundamentalism—privatization, deregulation, deep tax cuts—were considered completely lunatic. The world was dominated by Keynesianism and the idea of a strong welfare state. Jackson: That was the consensus. The government had a major role to play in the economy. Olivia: A tiny group of thinkers, led by economists like Friedrich Hayek and later Milton Friedman, refused to accept that. In 1947, they formed a society and met in a small Swiss village called Mont Pèlerin. For thirty years, they were basically an intellectual club in the wilderness. They developed their ideas, wrote books, funded think tanks, and patiently built a network. They were dismissed as cranks. Jackson: They were playing the long game. Olivia: The ultimate long game. Friedman said their job was to "keep ideas available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." And then, in the 1970s, their moment came: the oil crisis and stagflation. The old Keynesian model seemed to be failing, and suddenly, the world was desperate for an alternative. Jackson: And Hayek and Friedman's ideas were just... lying around, ready to be picked up. Olivia: Perfectly packaged and ready to go. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan swept into power and implemented the very ideas that were considered insane a generation earlier. They fundamentally changed the world. Bregman's point is not whether you agree with their ideas, but to study their strategy. Jackson: So he's saying that advocates for ideas like UBI or a 15-hour workweek need to do the same thing? Build the intellectual foundation now, so that when the next crisis hits, the ideas are ready. Olivia: Precisely. And he argues that the next big crisis is already on the horizon: automation and the "Race Against the Machine." Jackson: The draft horse analogy. Just as tractors made horses obsolete in agriculture, AI and robots could make human labor less and less valuable. We're already seeing it with wage stagnation, even as productivity soars. Olivia: Exactly. What happens when millions of jobs, not just manual labor but knowledge work like law, accounting, even journalism, are automated? The social fabric could tear apart. In that context, an idea like Universal Basic Income doesn't look like a utopian dream. It looks like a pragmatic, necessary safety net. It looks like a way to save capitalism from itself. Jackson: It’s a bit like what the labor leader Walter Reuther said to Henry Ford's grandson. Ford joked that robots wouldn't have to pay union dues, and Reuther shot back, "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?" You need people with money to have a functioning economy. Olivia: That's the perfect summary. The ideas in this book aren't just about being nice. They're about being realistic for the world we're heading into.

Jackson: You know, after all this, it feels like the book's title, Utopia for Realists, is perfect. The "utopia" part is about daring to imagine a radically better world, but the "realist" part is about grounding it in history, data, and a pragmatic strategy for change. Olivia: I think so too. It's a direct assault on cynicism. Bregman is arguing that cynicism is often just a mask for laziness. It's easy to say "that'll never work." It's much harder to do the work of imagining and building something better. Jackson: So it's not just about free money or shorter workweeks. The book is really a call to arms against a poverty of imagination. That feels like the biggest deficit we're facing right now. Olivia: It is. And Bregman’s point, which he borrows from Oscar Wilde, is that "progress is the realization of Utopias." Every bit of progress we cherish today—from the 40-hour workweek to universal suffrage—started as a ridiculous, impossible idea that people fought for. The first step is to simply allow ourselves to ask different questions and to start building castles in the sky again. Jackson: That’s a powerful thought to end on. It makes you wonder, what idea that sounds completely crazy today will be considered common sense in 30 years? Olivia: And what can we do to help get it there? Jackson: A question for all of us. Thanks, Olivia. This was fascinating. Olivia: Thank you, Jackson. This is Aibrary, signing off.