num_pages: 262
description: Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today. After working all day at jobs we often dislike we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman a Dutch historian reminds us it needn't be this wayand in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today. Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans Bregman takes us on a journey through history and beyond the traditional left-right divides as he champions ideas whose time have come. Every progressive milestone of civilizationfrom the end of slavery to the beginning of democracywas once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book both challenging and bracing demonstrates that new utopian ideas like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable and it is the only way to build the ideal world.
language: English
title: Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
publisher: Little, Brown and Company