 This afternoon we're happy to have Rutger Bregman on the Vora Media. He's the author of Utopia for Realists, originally published in Dutch in 2014. It is now available in paperback in English. Rutger, welcome. It's great to be here. The first question I really want to ask comes right at the start of the book. You say that the most profound crisis we presently face is one of imagination. Now on the one hand I'm inclined to agree, but on the other with climate change, ageing, automation, these are all very much material limits on our species, on potentially market capitalism. Do you really think that a crisis of imagination is the biggest impediment to human progress right now? Or in other words, if we could just have new ideas, new processes, new techniques, we can overcome pretty much any problem that's put in front of us. Well my frustration when I started writing this book a couple of years ago was that I saw so many people who caught themselves, progressives or people on the left, who knew very well what they were against. Against a lot of things, you know, racism, austerity, homophobia, growth, climate change, you name it, but didn't really have a clear idea of what they were actually for. So that's why I started writing the book, is that if you want to do about anything about the big challenges of today and climate change definitely is the main one here, I think you need to talk in the language of hope and talk in the language of progress. Now in that sense the book may already be a little bit dated because now for example in the US you have politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about a Green New Deal, which is exactly what I've been hoping for for the past couple of years is that those kind of politicians would rise, not just people who are talking about, the past in which supposedly everything was better, but also have a bought vision for the future. I understand the impulse to want to provide hope, because obviously these can be often quite bleak times, but do you think that has the potential to downplay the scope and scale of something like climate change? So even if we did have a successful Green New Deal in North America and Europe and we decarbonize the next 15-20 years, we could still see global warming of two degrees, which is called a low warming scenario, but that could still mean hundreds of millions of climate refugees, couldn't it? You're absolutely right. I'd like to make a distinction here between optimism and hope, right? So the optimist says, you know what, everything will be all right. We've seen so much progress in the past 30 years, we're richer, we're healthier, we're wealthier than ever, and indeed that's true. If you look at many statistics from the past couple of decades there's a lot to be grateful for, but then the optimist often assumes that history is this kind of roller coaster, that these things happen automatically, but now the main changes in the past two centuries, people fought for that very hard, and often they were first dismissed as unreasonable and radicals, right? The people first fought for the end of slavery or democracy or equal rights for men and women, that often starts on the fringes with these radical, so-called crazy people. And what they often have is not optimism, but they have hope, and hope can be false, right? Sometimes it turns out, you know, that doesn't work out the way you want, but you need it because then you can start imagining a different world and then you can make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. So one of the more hopeful proposals you have, originally the book in Dutch was called Free Money for All, Free Money for Everyone, is the universal-based income, which it's fair to say has become pretty mainstream over the years. It's almost not a utopian idea anymore. I mean, five years ago when I first wrote about it, almost no one knew what it was, right? I really had to explain that when I was giving lectures about it. It's just an amazing example of how these ideas often start on the fringes and then they start moving towards the center, and now it's always being discussed as a mainstream idea. You talk about how it's a policy proposal which could broach differences between the left and the right, and it's a very careful analysis of it in that regard, but do you not think that for the left a UBI, universal-based income, is very much a compliment to the traditional welfare state, or what's now being called universal-based services, whereas for the right it's viewed more as a replacement for them? Is that something that you're worried about, or do you think? Because in the book it seems you're quite hopeful about this being the kind of policy which can sort of broach parts and divides. What a couple of ideas here. In the first place you're absolutely right that there are versions of universal-based income out there that would be horrible, right? So there are some libertarians out there, for example in the US who say, let's just abolish the whole welfare state and just to plan it with one small cash grant. That'd be horrible, right? No doubt about that. I really think that a basic income should be a supplement to the great achievements of say the post-war world, right? A supplement to universal health care, to good quality public education, in that sense it should be the crowning achievement of social democracy. I think that's really important to keep in mind. Still it is also true that some of the criticisms of the welfare state that usually come from conservatives from the right about the welfare state being so bureaucratic, so paternalistic, you know, that so often people on the left have this assumption that they know what's best for the poor, right? That they can help the poor make better decisions in their lives. And to be honest I think that criticism is valid. And that the real experts on the poor's lives are the poor themselves and that it's true that there's a lot of evidence that just giving people money is often the best solution to this thing we call poverty. So in that sense you could argue that I make some right-wing points in my book is that I have a lot of faith in individual freedom, especially when I'm talking about the poor. You offer a sort of potted history of the idea of UBI really since arguably the late 18th century, but it comes really into focus in the mid 20th century. Why do you think ideas like an eight hour working day or the weekend or welfare state provision, why do you think they won but UBI didn't? What was the big difference? Because it looked almost inevitable at one point in the mid-60s and yet like you say until a few years ago it was disregarded as entirely implausible. Well I'm not the kind of historian that believes in big laws. You know that history is governed by these, I don't know, laws that you can just see these trends and that supposedly explain everything. I don't think that. There's a lot of coincidence here. So if you really zoom in on this history what you find is that at the end of the 60s almost everyone believed that some form of basic income was going to be implemented in the United States and in Canada and probably other countries would have followed after that. And then in the early 70s Richard Nixon almost did it, he had a modest proposal for a basic income which would have been quite revolutionary because it would have changed the whole thinking around what the welfare state can be. And then you really, if you then really delve into that history you find out that just last minute Nixon was convinced to do something different and to talk in a different language about welfare. He started talking about welfare as work fare, started talking about the lazy poor and he was convinced that basic income may not work out as well but it almost happened. There's also the tragic irony actually that his bill went through the House of Representatives twice and then it was killed in the Senate by Democrats who love the idea of a basic income but wanted a higher version of it. So yeah I think it's full of these kind of coincidences. Just touching on that idea of the economics of universal basic income. One common criticism and I think it's quite a valid one is that a effective UBI would be highly expensive and affordable UBI would be ineffective. So for instance Compass in the UK modelled a UBI of around £280 a month so it wasn't very generous. I think this would have cost in the region of £150 billion, £970 billion a year and the impact they saw on pensioner poverty was like fell by 5% or 6%. It fell from 16% to 11% something like this and child poverty I think more or less stayed static. What's your response to that idea that a useful UBI is unaffordable? Well that's definitely not the kind of basic income that I'm advocating. It would have to be much more substantial. Maybe the best way to think about this is that in the short run we move forward with implementing something like a guaranteed basic income. So how would that work? What you would actually do is as soon as people fall below the poverty line you'd automatically top up their incomes so that you really build a floor into the economy and no one can fall in poverty. Now if you now look at some of the models you'll find that for example in the US they calculated this a guaranteed basic income that completely eradicates poverty would cost around $350 billion. So that's less than half of the military budget. It's less than 1% of GDP. It's entirely affordable. Then if you look at the benefits of such a basic income of actually eradicating poverty what you'll find out is that for example the costs of child poverty are calculated like $500 billion. So it's cheaper to eradicate poverty than to combat the symptoms of it. I think this is another example where you can use a different kind of language almost kind of like a business or a right-wing language to defend progressive ideas. If you don't have a heart you have a wallet. It makes financial sense these these ideas investing in things like eradicating poverty or universal healthcare for that matter you get a great return on investment. In theory I agree with you but the left has adopted sort of rhetoric like that for about 15-20 years and on precisely these outcomes things have gone backwards. Do you think the problem with that is it's just been advanced by the wrong people or you sort of you see don't see a problem with the left defending certain policies on a sort of return on investment basis. When we talk about the war we often use the language of care and of things being unjust right and we want to help these people. Sure there's a certain part of the population that is receptive to that kind of language maybe 10 maybe 20 maybe 30% but you're not going to win elections with that. So this is often what I think people on the right are better at or conservatives are better at that they use sort of a broader span of you know moral frameworks or language that appeals to more people and in that sense yeah people on the left could do a much better job. But in the US a percentage of GDP twice as much as spent on healthcare yet 40 million people are uncovered. I mean that language doesn't seem to have prevailed there. Well why is a politician like AOC so effective right now? I think because she talks in the language of hope of optimism of like we can actually do this she taps into American history talks about a green new deal she shows that actually in the 50s and the 60s the US at much higher top marginal tax rates for the very rich that's sort of the things you can try and do instead of just only talking about things being unjust and you're against this and you're against that. I'm not saying you shouldn't be against all those things but you've got to think carefully how you can actually appeal to a much broader group of people. And so you would see this as a sort of failing of the sense elect in the early 2000s. Yeah it's what I call underdog socialism right so that's not Blair I mean sorry to interrupt you but that's not the experience in Britain is of course the Tony Blair is. That's not Tony Blair and yet social attitudes for instance against people on benefits went backwards. I wouldn't call Tony Blair as being anywhere on the left I guess yeah yeah Margaret Thatcher was once asked what she considered her biggest victory I think that was at the end of the 90s and she answered well my biggest victory was Tony Blair and Neil Labour which is I think a great example of how political change often works right we we often so really focus on politicians in the present if you zoom out a little bit what really matters are the ideas that are pushing the political debate. Technocrats of the heart yeah yeah I like that idea I know I mean I generally agree with you but the experience here perhaps perhaps it's just the wrong people peddling that kind of language. GDP it's another big idea how limited is it in terms of measuring the success of a society. Well again if you go back to the history of the concept of a gross domestic product it's quite fascinating to find out that the guy who invented it Simon Kutzenetz the American economist what he actually said is that we should never ever use it as a measure of progress you know it was really invented to do something about the recession in the 1930s and to help the American economy prepare for the war it was very useful for that as well but not as a measure of progress and so what Kutzenetz said is if you still want to use it in that way then at least at least subtract all spending on the military on advertising in the whole financial sector because they don't contribute much to the general welfare of the people that's the guy who invented it right since then what we've seen happening is that yeah GDP really has become this holy grail that it's started to dominate the whole political debate and journalists and politicians all focused on oh it's a percentage point up it's down etc you know careers are being made and broken by it yeah it's become this bizarre ideology basically. So if you read the economists you see on the back page is always the GDP stats quarterly annual for every year and it's like it's like weird everyday ideologues because it is a mass publication go straight to the GDP stats it's almost like looking at the football results yeah yeah and they're so imprecise actually you have these corrections often after a couple of years and they update the GDP statistics and sometimes whole recessions just disappear so for example there are some historians that argue that you know that the the recession at the end of the 70s I believe that was helpful in bringing more protection to power actually disappeared in the later statistics so so it was a recession wasn't a recession yeah wow I didn't know that but that's that's the thing these these numbers are so influential here and then the other thing is that GDP assumes that the amount of money or wealth that you contribute towards GDP is actually the amount of wealth you contribute to the real world which is obviously not true at all you know just before the financial crash the financial sector in the UK was huge like 10 11% of GDP was it creating so much wealth then no obviously not it was destroying wealth on a massive scale never seen before in British history so that's incredibly misleading to look at those figures and and to pretend that you know something about the health of of urecon do we need bankers you talk about briefly about I think bankers going to strike in Ireland in the 70s right 70s yeah do we need bankers or should finance be socialized I mean how important is that sector of the economy to to running things as we see it in an everyday sort of level well here again I like the idea of just going back to the 50s basically so uh Trump had this has this idea obviously of make America great again wants to go back to the 50s and yeah we had top marginal tax rates of like 80 90% in the 50s we had a financial sector that was much much smaller like back then bankers were like I don't know the sort of the head of a school like respected figures but not you know with these huge houses and and and multiple cars etc just much more modest and the banking sector was really a service sector that helped other industries do their work right so I think that you need bankers definitely but you don't need the all that speculation that's going on right now all these destructive financial products that don't add anything to the wealth of our society but just extract it from people who are doing the real work and if you don't believe me you can just read you know the latest reports from even you know organizations like the International Monetary Fund or even the Bank of International Settlements is writing the same things right now is that actually what we've seen since the 70s in the 80s is that so many smart people who used to go on and work for say universities for example now they all go into banking and they're wasting their lives over there they're way too smart to be to be working for banks they could they could be thinking about the cure for cancer or how we get to Mars or all these or or how we deal with climate change right so that's really one of the biggest tragedies of our times is that we're wasting so much talent in these bullshit industry yeah I mean Cain's famously referred to economists so as he would like to see them as being some of the dentists sort of a technical role that's just correcting sort of imperfections yeah in terms of Britain as well and where we might call it a misallocation of labor the best engineers in this country go work for arms manufacturers BAE systems yeah and the best quantitative people sort of mathematicians scientists go to work in the city yeah I mean like you say it's just yeah but it's remember here that this isn't it's sorry it's important to remember here that this is not inevitable it's really caused by these changes we made in the tax code in you know the deregulation of the financial sector for example is that suddenly all these jobs exist where they can you know pay these people so much money it wasn't the case 30 40 years ago so yeah we can move back to an economy where people especially rich people or people with all these talents actually do something useful there was a poll just a couple of months ago by two Dutch economists where they asked people in I think more than 20 30 countries something like that they asked them the question do you think your job adds anything of value to society right do you contribute to the common good turns out that in developed economies 25 percent of the workforce says not sure probably not 25 percent just think about it's pretty hard right think about that so we've got an employment an employment rate here what is it five six percent historically so this is five times as high and no one's talking about it and who are these people whether certainly not teachers or or nurses or care workers or whatever I mean we're talking about bankers and lawyers and and consultants people who went to great universities to Oxford or Cambridge you know and society paid a lot to get them educated and then they go on to do these jobs and it's not me just say it's people themselves saying they're not contributing anything and then they have their midlife crisis when they're like 40 years old and then they start painting the rest of their lives can't we just skip that can't people just immediately start doing what they actually want to do and do something useful again this is why I'm enthusiastic about a basic income because in the first place it would give people the means to actually do something that they care about but in the second place it will give much more bargaining power to the nurses and the care workers and the teachers who do the really valuable work that if they go on strike we're in trouble right so in a basic income society with a high enough basic income their wages go up and the people who do all these bullshit jobs you know as the American anthropologist David Graver calls them their wages will have to go down because if they go on strike no one cares right go on strike for sure if you were talking to labor right now you're talking to Jeremy Corbyn John McDonnell obviously there could be a general election there's going to be one obviously between now and 2022 it's probably going to be more likely sooner rather than later and they said Rutger we're looking at a full day weekend we're looking at a small UBI these are policies which have been outlined recently by the New Economics Foundation we're looking at universal basic services but we know we can't sort of adopt all three in a labor party manifesto what would your advice be to them why can't you adopt all three of them the costs I mean if you were to say if we were to say UBS for transfer free universe just to clarify for the audience the UBS of public transport education healthcare housing I mean that's clearly hundreds of billions clearly UBI we could model 200 billion plus four day week I mean we'll put that to one side because some arguments say the productivity gains make up for the day lost but you would just save them do all of it sure yeah and you got to think about the returns of all these investments as well right that's what often frustrates me is that we even people on the left only talk about the cost so this is too expensive that is too expensive now the real thing that's really expensive is child poverty or poverty in general that is expensive that we can't afford that in terms of higher healthcare costs higher crime rates kids doing less well in school so yeah I think that especially the labor party right now shouldn't be so obsessed with I don't know trying to be a moderate or a centrist once again right I think we live in a time right now where the real radical thing the real crazy thing is to be a centrist or a moderate and to pretend that just tinkering around the edges will do it it's not enough it's it's clear I mean in just 10 20 30 years we need to have this massive transformation of the whole economy right we need to ultimately move into some kind of war economy something that has never been done before in peacetime if we want to address the threat of climate change so you can't be a moderate it's the most irresponsible thing right now to be a moderate a lot of your proposals politics sort of just say 50s 60s look at the tax rates look at how universal well but look at how universal welfare provision was look at rises in GDP productivity wages and that's all inarguable the counterargument to those policies and that reading and the tendency which says we can just replicate that in the 21st century is to say well actually the historical conditions which make post-war social democracy possible and it was incredibly successful were a one-off so you get a massive move of workers from country to city women entering the labor market obviously huge extraction of fossil fuels adoption of technologies which have been hanging around really for 50 60 70 80 years in places like Italy Japan and just all of a sudden becoming incredibly diffuse that creates massive growth rates which can then allow this compact between the state and capital of both high profits but also high taxes and the argument is that isn't replicable so we can't look back to post-war social democracy as a model in terms of the economies and societies we want to build in the 2020 2030s what do you think of that counterargument well here's what I think about think about something like the new deal in the US right what made it so effective obviously was there there was a lot of slack in the economy there were so much people you know basically without a job who all you know wanted to contribute something and they could use that but actually if you look at our current economy it's pretty much the same thing maybe people are not like literally unemployed but then at least they're in a job that they don't care about so we have an extraordinary amount of of slack in the current economy we could do so much bigger things than we think are possible right now I think we could easily move in 10 20 years to a zero carbon economy we could do that we are more than rich enough we got we got the the brilliant minds for it we've got the technologies already it's just a matter of deploying deploying deploying what's really holding us back here is not technology it's not economics but it's ideology right it's all here and I think that's the main thing that needs to change and that's why I you know started my book with the point that the real crisis we have right now is a crisis of the imagination