Reddit reviews Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

I highly recommend reading Rutger’s book Utopia For Realists.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316471917/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1550692455&sr=8-2

>You've pulled numbers out of the air, basically

That's strange, I would've imagined you disproving my figures since I made them up. That would certainly be a lot more convincing than endlessly repeating "utopian" and "data driven" while hiding behind Pinker.

edit: speaking of utopia, you should read this book. Pinker wrote a glowing recommendation for it. https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/0316471917/

In Rutger Bergman’s Utopia For Realists, he outlines all the studies that have been done showing that Universal Basic Income works wonders. MLK was fighting for it and it got passed in the US House of Representatives twice before failing under the Democratic Senate because they were saying it should be higher. Then Nixon and that whole thing happened and we forgot about it.

Now there’s a Presidential candidate in the US that includes it in his platform, and that’s Andrew Yang. His implementation proposes $1,000 per month for every US citizen over 18 until they die.

As for the high rents, there’s a thing called NIMBYism, from Not In My Backyard laws, where people fight to have affordable housing not built near their own homes, because they’re worried it would lower their own home’s value. That’s generally a local thing, and not up to the Federal Government, as far as I’m aware, though they could incentivize and pressure states and local governments to relax the NIMBY laws.

Combine those two things and we could eliminate a lot of homelessness, which would enable the jobless to work and contribute more to society, I know most of them have jobs, but this would also enable people working shittier jobs to get better jobs.
Utopia For Realists is a dope book, that I bet a lot of people in this sub would find interesting. It’s funny, too.

Very interesting article, thanks for posting!

The article mentions several books advocating for UBI, including Annie Lowrey's Give People Money, Andy Stern's Raising the Floor, Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght's Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists. I have not read them, but from the article it sounds like they all make similar arguments in favor of a UBI and differ over the amount it should be. I believe all of them are assuming that it would be done at a national scale - I don't really understand why this couldn't be done at smaller jurisdictions (different states already have different policies about sales and income taxes, and Alaska has the closest thing in the US now to a UBI with its annual oil revenues share), or most ideally (but also more unrealistically) at a global scale (as the article points out a few dollars a week could lift millions of Indians out of extreme poverty.

I hadn't planned to include any of these books in the seminar, but if there is a strong interest in going into more depth on UBI, we could definitely do this. Maybe it would make most sense to select a set of books on the topic and split them amongst the class rather than having everyone read the same book, unless there is one book that is particularly good.

Absolutely serious. Philanthropy isn't inherently a bad thing, but when it comes from billionaires, it is just a means to keep control over their exploitative gains and prevent fixes to problems that would undermine their businesses.

>heck, some characters (especially in the first novel) are complete opposites of their movie counterparts.

Didn't the woman paleontologist save a male character in the second book, then they switched the role in the movie? IDK why that stands out in my head.

Have you read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Brusatte yet? I picked it up, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

Ninja edit: Utopia for realists I'm sure if it's on amazon.ca it's on amazon.com assuming you live in the USA.