#I feel honestly wretched not answering it a million times because people repeatedly have the revelation

[foldingfittedsheets]

Every fifth ask I get about my ask tag I’m gonna reblog one of the existing times I’ve addresses it.

[ducktales-wco-oo]

✩ { @calvinsmuses​​​ } ✩ - Continued from ★

{ ☆ } He’s calling them by that name. 

Even now, when he’s doing what Jayden KNOWS he is trying to do again, Carroll calls them by that name. Like it still means something. Like it somehow is supposed to make what he’s about to say okay. Like he hasn’t called Jayden that for years, held them and comforted them and supposedly loved them for years and PROMISED years more... and is now about to break that promise. Those many promises. Again... 

How is it that Jayden can be certain he could never feel worse than he does at a moment— like the first time he was kicked out of a home, or the second time he was 'returned’ and realized that the problem may be him, or the time when he realized he couldn’t recall how many families it had been... the time he decided that it didn’t matter anymore... that it couldn’t matter anymore if he was going to survive... that time when he broke his own rule and allowed himself to think someone might actually want him around for good- only to believe that he didn’t.

But here he is... small and pathetic and dangerously-close to shattering right in front of the man he both wanted to believe he COULD break in front of, and yet now doesn’t think he should. Because if he does, if Jayden allows himself to splinter into the millions of pieces he can feel stabbing at his heart— puncturing his lungs and making it difficult to breathe, causing his chest to feel like it may concave until he disappears into himself entirely —then he’ll simply be proving what Carroll is unwittingly telling him... 

That Jayden is not good enough.

If Jayden was, this wouldn’t be a problem. Carroll wouldn’t feel the need to push them away AGAIN. Wouldn’t think that Jayden is so pitiful, so helpless that they can’t survive some long distance. That they’re so emotionally weak, they NEED the constant attention. The constant hugs and kisses and... and maybe they have grown dependent on it. Have gotten accustomed to Carroll being there for them— aside from that time when he wasn’t —and now... Now the thought of being without Carroll is an unthinkable as losing a limb. Worse than that honestly. He could make due without an arm, or a leg, or Hell- even his sight; stubbornness likely being more than enough for them to continue pursuing a career in design. But being without Carroll in their life... it feels as if they’d be giving it up entirely.

Because Carroll is as ingrained within it as breathing... Always has been, since they first met if Jayden is being honest; even if at the start he’d been reluctant to allow the new duckling to get too close. But somehow, Carroll had wormed his way in... and stayed there. Throughout everything that came and went in Jayden’s life, and the friends that followed who also managed to stay despite Jayden’s expectations, Carroll was the constant... Maybe Carroll’s right. Maybe his life would be better without Jayden in it. He just NEEDS to ‘learn not to love him’. 

Needs to learn not to love him. For ‘their’ sanity. Carroll’s sanity. Because loving Jayden just doesn’t work... It doesn’t work. It never works. It doesn’t work and Carroll needs to build his own life. Jayden hadn’t been aware that the one he was living right now was so shitty. That Jayden wasn’t part of his actual plan. That the life Carroll REALLY wanted doesn’t have them in it. Forever... What a fucking joke. And Jayden was the idiot who believed it... and throughout it all, Carroll still keeps saying that he LOVES them. Keeps showering them with empty praise and flowery prose, nervous and fumbled as it may be... Like it’s supposed to help matters.

All it does is prove to Jayden that they really are worthless... If someone like Carroll— sensitive and sweet and on the verge of tears... and yet still smart enough to know that Jayden isn’t someone to settle for —doesn’t have it in himself to want them around, then who would? Who should? ... They loved Carroll. Love him... Allowed themselves to TRUST in him, to let their walls down... to not worry about being anything but themselves... and look what that got them? They drove him away. Proved everyone else right. Made it to where even Carroll realized that as much as he might claim to love holding them and kissing them and taking comfort in their company... they weren’t good enough for ‘forever’. Not by a long-shot.

And yet Jayden knows that if they aren’t careful, they’ll try anyway. 

Pleas for Carroll to stay already lie on the tip of their tongue, Jayden swallowing thickly as if that will shove them down. But they simply lodge in their throat alongside their heart, an uncomfortable sensation that rivals the twisting in their guts and the burning in their eyes, Carroll’s form blurred beyond recognition as tears overtake hues of green. He’s going to cry. He already knows it... There’s no mistaking the way they overflow and drip down his cheeks, flattening fluffy feathers with streaks that scald. But if he’s going to cry, then he damn well isn’t going to beg while doing it. Isn’t going to make Carroll think even LESS of him than he already does. Isn’t going to shatter only for Carroll to step over the pieces and OUT the door... 

He might be crying... but they can still yell while doing it. 

They have to.

They have to do something.

❝  Do I know?  ❞  Words sound so broken that at first, Jayden isn’t even certain he spoke them; quiet and shaky and taking every ounce of effort he has just to pass his lips. Fists balled at his sides to hide the way hands want to fidget with the end of his hoodie or sleeves — a nervous tick he was never able to shake —chest shakes with labored breaths, it taking all of Jayden’s willpower to speak through the suffocating sobs that linger just beneath the surface. But talking seems to be keeping the worst at bay... So he keeps talking. Whatever that may bring.  ❝  Because all I REALLY know is that this is the second time you’ve decided to break your promise. Forever and always was nothing but a- a bunch of CRAP!  ❞

❝  And I never even asked you to make it!  ❞  Granted, Jayden had been the one to mention ‘always’ first. But they never forced Carroll to make that promise in return... Still, that doesn’t stop cheeks from flooding with warmth— shame and embarrassment mingling together into the feeling of wanting the floor to swallow them whole —Jayden unable to keep from putting most of the blame on themself for bringing it up at all. Even if Carroll had repeatedly hammered that point in afterward, Jayden had opened the gates. They had allowed this to happen... They had been STUPID enough to believe it meant something.  ❝  YOU did that! You did everything! You’re the one who said you loved me! You’re STILL saying it! Like- Like what? That’s supposed to make this better? Supposed to make it OKAY that you’ve spent years stringing me along like some idiot who actually thought that- that... ❞

No. He can’t stop. Don’t stop... Keep going. 

❝  Y-You should have just left me THE HELL ALONE!  ❞  Voice trembles, expression more pained than the anger Jayden wants to convey. Confused... Betrayed. Glossy eyes focused on Carroll as if answers can even be found, he weakly continues,  ❝  Why didn’t you just stay away the first time? You LEFT me and then- then you said you missed me... and now you’re saying you’ll be better off without me and I fucking KNOW THAT! I know that and I knew that and I- I... You don’t get to just- You don’t get to say you love me and... and DO this... again....  ❞  Losing steam, all Jayden wants to do is curl up in his bed and sob until his voice finally gives out and he won’t have to hear the wretched sound. But glossy glare remains riveted on Carroll, unwilling to lose whatever time he may have left to see him,  ❝  So don’t- don’t give me that CRAP about how great I am or any other flowery, poetic bullshit. Because we both know you’re just talking out of your ass like you ALWAYS do.  ❞

❝  You know... I’m used to people deciding I’m not worth their fucking time. I expect it. And yeah, it’s kinda shitty to tell someone they’re a lost cause, or just not worth the effort of helping, or god forbid- aren’t ‘fit for a family’ -whatever the FUCK that is supposed to mean.  ❞  Jayden hurriedly gripes, air quotes accompanying phrases they’d been told far too often through their life... Breath hitching, fresh tears brim as Jayden bitterly spats,  ❝  But at least those assholes had the decency to be upfront with me! Not make me the fucking dumbass who thought things might be different, when everyone else probably read the writing on the wall the FIRST time Mr. ‘Forever-And-Always’ wanted to play tongue twister with some theater tramp!  ❞  { ☆ } 

[tanadrin]

Utopia: A How-To Guide

So, I picked up "Utopia For Realists" by Rutger Bregman at Dussman yesterday, somewhat intrigued by its title; based on the blurbs inside the cover and the summary on the back, I was expecting something, well, a lot more utopian: a look at crazy pie in the sky ideas which sound terribly interesting but also are ridiculously impractical. In reality, the book is much more modest. It's basically a 250-page, meticulously footnoted argument for a modest progressive political program, written in an informal and approachable style, which has some (fairly restrained) rebukes in it toward leftism that's more about shoring up the identities of activists, or aiming at poorly defined abstract goals than actually improving people's lives. I don't think many people reading this will substantially disagree with the ideas Bregman presents, but he condenses a lot of persuasive arguments in favor of them into a single place, and in a form which I think is likelier to appeal to the average person interested in politics as opposed to the average rationalist-adjacent Tumblr user.

Notes I made and passages I highlighted:

The opening chapter is basically about how much *better* the modern world is than the world of the recent past; this is probably obvious to anybody who's at all sympathetic to Whig history or interested in technological progress/transhumanism, but Bregman is making a larger point here: a lot of the things that were hilariously impossible Utopian dreams in the past we have achieved, and we've achieved them precisely because people were capable of imagining absurd Utopias, and refused to give up on them until they achieved them. In contrast, Bregman contends, most contemporary politics is patching minor deficiencies in the current system--important, to be sure, but this work doesn't provide a structure for forward progress, and we're in danger of stalling out, and letting runaway income inequality and other issues derail our forward momentum as a civilization--and cause a lot of unnecessary pain in the process. I really like the chart on p. 3, which charts life expectancy and per capita income across the world in 1800 versus today; even the most wretched country in the 21st century is doing better than the most prosperous country in 1800. The Netherlands (Bregman's home) and the U.S. had life expectancies of about 40 and per capita incomes of about $3,000 or less in 1800; even Sierra Leone and the Congo are doing better in terms of life expectancy now, and a large but still developing country like India is trouncing U.S. per capita income in 1800. The world has gotten a *lot* better, in other words, even if it still has a long way to go.

p. 7-8: Bregman cites a figure saying that vaccines against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio, which are notable for all being "dirt cheap", have saved more lives than would peace would have in the 20th century. That's a frankly astonishing figure, if true. His source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-identifies-the-areas-in-which-increased-development-spending-can-do-the-most-good

p.9: For people concerned about IQ, Bregman points out that IQ has gone up an average of 3-5 points every ten years due to improved nutrition and education. This reinforces my belief that any attempt to work out whether IQ actually varies significantly among different human populations due to genetic factors is basically doomed from the get-go, since that information is hopelessly confounded by other factors (and because an evolutionary biologist once told me strongly selected-for traits like intelligence is in humans should be expected to vary by very little in any species; if IQ did vary strongly among between populations for genetic reasons, it would be *very unusual* in that regard).

p. 12-15: Bregman wants to distinguish between two kinds of Utopia: "blueprint" utopias, as he calls them, where you decide what the Utopia looks like ahead of time and how to get there, and then spend all your time and energy forcing society to fit that mold--via revolution, dictatorship, terror, etc., whatever means will achieve your ends--verses a more ideal (idealistic?) kind of utopia that's about broadening possibilities of the future. This is more just about not saying "no" reflexively to weird ideas: instead of saying "Ah, UBI is nice but it's a crazy idea," you look at what it *would* take to achieve it. This also entails being able to criticize your own ideas--and to adapt them when they prove not to be working. Honestly, I don't think this is necessarily utopianism at all: I think this is ordinary progressive politics, seeing a critical flaw in society and demanding we work our utmost to change it rather than saying "good enough." If this feels utopian then it's because our standards for what is achievable have fallen sharply in the last thirty or forty years (more on that later).

p. 17-19: Even Bregman is not immune from the occasional tiresome moral panic. Angst about narcissism in a pampered generation; none of this is central to his thesis, though, just shallow culture criticism.

p. 34: Discussion of the Mincome experiment in Canada, which was started by a lefty government in Manitoba, shut down by a righty government that came to power after them, and whose results remained unanalyzed in for decades in the National Archives. The researcher who dug up these files after they sat gathering dust for years and years? Evelyn Forget. You cannot make this stuff up. (@slatestarscratchpad, I know he appreciates this kind of thing).

p. 37-8: I knew about Mincome; I read an article about it a while back, when UBI was just getting into the news. I did not know there were four other UBI experiments in North America around the same time, all in the U.S. The U.S., in fact, for a tantalizing moment in the Nixon administration, was relatively close to implementing something like UBI, as a way of eradicating poverty. For various reasons, including a century-and-a-half old British government report (more on that later), the bill failed; but America came very close to implementing a safety net that by the standards of our present political moment is *very* Utopian. And, I can't stress this enough, this was under Richard Nixon.

p. 55-62: A section entitled "Why Poor People Do Dumb Things," which basically takes various scientific studies and uses them to argue that poverty 1) makes idiots of us all; 2) is self-perpetuating, and as a result 3) is really, really hard to escape unless the immediate cause of the psychological stress it produces--i.e., an acute lack of money--is removed. Also probably a good answer for why poor *societies* continue to be poor; I can't imagine these cognitive limitations Bregman is talking about go away just because more of your society is experiencing them.

p. 58: "So in concrete terms, just how much dumber does poverty make you? 'Our effects correspond to between 13 and 14 IQ points,' Shafir says. 'That's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.'" I don't know much about IQ, but I feel like 13-14 IQ points is *a lot of IQ points.* And again: the fact that this effect is so large makes me think any attempt to search out a genetic source for IQ variation is futile.

p. 59 mentions an interesting experiment to control for individual variation in IQ by comparing the performance on cognitive tests of farmers in India who make almost all their income right at harvest. Just before and just after harvest gives an opportunity to compare differences in performance  when cash is tight versus when cash isn't night in the same group of people (the effect found in other experiments, including ones in the developed world, seeemd to hold).

p. 68: Arguments with lefty types like my family often result in somebody bringing up the fact that capitalism necessitates the creation of a poor underclass, to which everyone promptly agrees as if this is the most obvious or well-studied fact in human history. This drives me *nuts*, because it's one of those wild overreaching statements that makes an *empirical assertion* about a facet of economics and society that, being empirical, should be verifiable or falsifiable (or which at least some form of evidence for or against could be acquired). But I've never seen a single study cited in support of this notion; never seen even a lazy historical analogy drawn between societies experiencing similar conditions but with different economic systems to support this argument. It's Aristotle-level laziness about the empirical universe: Capitalism is bad, poverty is bad, therefore capitalism causes poverty. I know I'm the world's worst leftist, but things like this are why: we would rather repeatedly assert a statement which comforts us that we are on the right side of history than critically investigate the assertion (repeated by a legion of leftist political philosophers) that might require us to confront the fact that the leftist understanding of economics is... deficient. To say the least. And that if you are going to make empirical assertions about the structure of society and about its economic organization, you had better know what you're talking about, or you run the risk of creating a leftist empire built on ideology that collapses when it is forced to confront reality. *coughtheentirewarsawpactcough* On p. 68, Bregman cites an *actual* example of an economic system that necessitates the existence of an underclass. It's mercantilism, the system capitalism replaced (and which has been lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty ever since).

Dryly observing the fact that capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, of course, gets you tarred and feathered as a neoliberal or even (inexplicably) a fascist in some leftist circles (like my family). It doesn't matter if you still think capitalism has grievous shortcomings; you must participate in the Ritual of Blaming Everything on Capitalism in order to qualify as a real leftist, apparently, which makes me feel like one of those Dutch atheists in the 17th century who had to say "well of *course* God exists" before being able to make my argument as to why burning bushes aren't real and basing your society on a Bronze age ethnic mythology from the Middle East is a terrible idea.

p. 70-71: It's weird to lump Utah and the Netherlands into the same category, but the two polities in the 21st century who seem to have first discovered how to eliminate homelessness are... Utah and the Netherlands. Spoiler alert: giving people homes is relatively cheap.

p. 79: Speenhamland, which sounds like a budget brand of meat spread you occasionally see in the grocery store but never have the courage to try, is really the source of a lot of our problems around just giving poor people money. We can, strange as it sounds, probably blame an obscure, 170-year-old English experiment in basic income, and the inquiry that followed it, for the failure of the idea during the Nixon administration--and, subsequently, the U.S.'s rightward shift toward welfare 'reform,' a revival of the notion that there is deserving and undeserving poverty, and that if you're poor, it's because you're lazy.

Martin Anderson, one of Nixon's advisors, used excerpts from Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation"--specifically, the bits about the Speenhamland system--to turn Nixon off his plan for the Family Security System in 1969. Polanyi presented a damning indictment of the Speenhamland system based on the parliamentary inquiry used to justify dismantling it, and indeed the original report was harshly critical of the system. Trouble is, the report was mostly written before the results of the inquiry were gathered; and the numerous surveys and interviews conducted during the inquiry were almost entirely aimed, not at the people who actually benefitted from the Speenhamland system, but clergy and landowners who were critical of it from the beginning. The comissioner responsible for the report had written the draconian Poor Laws he wanted to implement before the report was even begun; even the leftist criticisms (from Marx and Engels) of government assistance were based on the lies of Speenhamland, alienating the left from its natural ally when it came to alleviating the condition of the poor, i.e., the only institution in society powerful enough to solve massive coordination issues like wealth redistribution. Lucky for us, modern leftists don't regard Marx and Engels as writers of scripture whom we dare not criticize for their imperfect knowlede of economics that is 200 years out of--wait, shit.

p.88 spells out for the first time in anything I've read what the demographic transition actually entails; I've always been slightly muddled as to why people want to have less kids when they get richer; if nothing else, if people like having kids and they have more money to support them, why wouldn't they have more? I always figured I was just missing something. And I was! People don't have lots of kids pre-demographic transition because they like having kids; they have lots of kids because that's the only insurance they have that when they're old there will be someone to care for them. More children provide more economic stability; so when society is more prosperous, when you can save money to retire on, and when the government implements a safety net, the birth rate drops--down to a level which more closely resembles how much people *actually like* having children. Having birth control available helps; but sometimes it just means people marrying later, or (probably) having different kinds of sex. This implies 1) modernity isn't 'destroying families,' it's just that people don't like having big families nearly as much as either the traditionalists or the evolutionary psychologists would assume, and 2) the demographic transition is probably permanent, i.e., we're not going to see the birth rate mysteriously start creeping upward in a hundred years in rich societies once we've adapted to our current levels of affluence. (Most) people just don't like having kids as much as we might naively assume.

A lot of bonus stuff in this part from people like Malthus who woefully misunderstood the psychology of poverty. And, sadly, their ideas are actually not all that out of date.

p. 91-2: "Now and then politicians are accused of taking too little interest in the past. In this case, however, Nixon was perhaps taking too much. Even a century and a half after the fatal report, the Speenhamland myth was still alive and kicking. When Nixon's bill foundered in the Senate, conservative thinkers began lambasing the welfare state, using the very same misguided argumetns applied back in 1834.

These arguments echoed in 'Wealth and Poverty,' the 1981 mega-bestseller by George Gilder that would make him Reagan's most cited author and that characterized poverty as a moral problem rooted in laziness and vice. And they appeared again a few years later in 'Loosing Ground,' an influential book in which the conservative sociologist Charles Murray recycled the Speenhamland myth. Government support, he wrote, would only undermine the sexual morals and work ethic of the poor.

It was like Townsend and Malthus all over again, but as one historian rightly notes, 'Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.' Even former Nixon adviser Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in a basic income when divorce rates were initially thought to have spiked during the Seattle pilot program, a conclusion later debunked as a mathematical error."

p. 95: "Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of 'activating' policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training. No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, the unemployed who haven't developed their 'employment skills' or simply haven't given it their best shot."

Related: every time I see somebody say something about how all we need to do is train West Virginia coal miners to code, I want to bang my head on a wall. Look, I've never met any West Virginian coal miners, but I have known middle aged people from the South who use a computer maybe for an hour a week, and maybe from within your bubble computer skills are something anybody can easily acquire, because everyone you know is comfortable in that environment and easily navigates the metaphors of, say, object-oriented programming and smartphone interfaces, but I *promise* you the problem is so much harder than you understand. It's a proposal that is at once condescending and infuriatingly naive, and unfortunately it's a general pattern that applies to a lot of the bandaid solutions people have for the growing American precariat. Just give them money. Let them decide what they need. Just give them money!

p. 104: Bergman is frustrated by the shortfalls of GDP as a measure of a country's prosperity--and don't worry, he's not impressed by Bhutan's "Gross National Happiness" either. "Bhutan rocks the chart in its own index, which conveniently leaves out the Dragon King's dictatorship and the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa." (p.118)

He makes some good points--GDP is a more subjective measure than people like to admit; it's hard to measure the produce of certain kinds of work, like Wikipedia which provides tons of practical value to society but is free; in GDP terms the ideal citizen is a compulsive gambler with cancer going through a drawn-out divorce he copes with using massive amounts of antidepressants.

p. 106: "Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime - in terms of GDP, the more the better [because fixing these problems generates economic activity]. That's why the country with the planet's highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems. 'By the standards of the GDP,' says the writer Jonathan Rowe, 'the worst families in America are those that actually function as families - that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner, and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture." OK, there's a little bit of moral panic here, but the broader point is that if your policy goal is maximizing GDP, you're not necessarily maximizing the things people want in their day to day lives; and if the GDP is growing, people aren't necessarily seeing consistent improvement in their lives. The real issue here is careful and nuanced construction of policy, which is probably doable, but kinda tough; Bergman isn't advocating a single alternative to the GDP, and admits even the GDP has its uses (though it most useful moment was probably during World War 2, when measuring the material amount of stuff the country could produce was most urgent).

This chapter also touches nicely on another annoying rhetorical reflex I find among lefties, the whole "resources are finite, the GDP can't grow forever." The GDP isn't a measure of the consumption of finite resources; it's a measure of money moving around in the economy (and hopefully of wealth being created). Non-tangible goods with no or very high limit on the resources they consume, like video games or hours of representation by a lawyer or sex work, all contribute to the GDP, and in an increasingly service-oriented economy the GDP can indeed continue to grow without necessarily substantially increasing resource consumption--especially if we're also making better use of the resources we harvest through, e.g., recycling and renewable energy. You know, things we've been pursuing eagerly for the last half-century. Seriously; do you even *care a little bit* about actually understanding what terms like 'GDP' mean?

p. 107: "The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of char mechanics." Though I'm not sure how to correct something like this.

p. 108: More on the shortcomings of the GDP, and how in rich countries it's a poor correlate to actual prosperity. In developing countries, though, GDP is still mostly pretty good.

p. 117-119: Some alternatives to GDP, like Genuine Progress Indicator and Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which incorporate measures of pollution/crime/inequality. "In Western Europe, GPI has advanced a good deal slower than GDP, and in the U.S. it has even receded since the 1970s." Might explain why America feels so crummy compared to Europe whenever I go back there. Like, I don't deny that some parts are fantastically prosperous, but I don't see how anyone who isn't upper middle class can begin to afford to live in most of the U.S.

p. 120: On the absolute limits of economic efficiency. "Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor's checkups can't simply be made 'more efficient.'" Well, maybe; there definitely are things in society that can't be, though I think those two are weak examples. He also talks about Baumol's Cost Disease, though in a way different from how I understood it when @slatestarscratchpad was discussing it; if I am understanding him correctly, Bregman says the phenomenon of prices increasing in labor intensive sectors doesn't reflect those sectors actually getting more expensive so much as society choosing to spend more money there, because we have more money to spend as a result of other sectors becoming more efficient.

"Shouldn't we be calling this a blessing, rather than a disease? After all the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and inform and to organize education on a more personal scale. Which is great, right? According to Baumol, the main impediment to allocating our resources toward such noble ends is 'the illusion that we cannot afford them.'

As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you're obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it's difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don't realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they're viewed as a disease.

Yet unless we prefer to run our schools and hospitals as if they were  factories, we can be certain that, in the race against the machine, the costs of healthcare and education will only go up. At the same time, products like refrigerators and cars have become "too cheap". To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of its costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroyed an equivalent of seven pounds in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of twelve pounds in terms of health and sustainability."

p. 122: "Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia." I actually disagree here: I think governing by numbers is in principle a fine idea. What's a terrible idea is governing by bad, ambiguous, or useless numbers. A bad measure of national well-being is no better than *no* measure; but you have to have some kind of yardstick or you're just guessing. Responsive policy has to have *something* to respond to.

p. 123-4: On the disillusionment of the inventor of GDP, Simon Kuznets, with the GDP.

p. 134: "But the most disappointing fail? The rise of leisure." I do believe that's the first time I've ever seen "fail" as a simple noun in print. Language marches on, lol.

p. 135-136: On the failure of the workweek to continue getting shorter, even once the size of the labor force increased upon women entering it. I admit that when it comes to a shorter workweek, I have Questions. In principle, yes, a more productive economy means more resources to spread around which means people having to work less; in practice, short of a basic income funded by big taxes on productivity, people working less means less taxable income for the government and less personal income. Nonetheless, the work week getting shorter from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the 70s or 80s or so was accompanied by an *increase* in people's incomes as wages rose. In other words, I'm saying I don't have a good understanding of the economic issues at play here, and I wish I understood them more clearly.

p. 139-140: On the shorter workweek increasing productivity. Henry Ford saw big productivity gains by decreasing his employees' work week from 60 to 40 hours, due to his workers being better-rested and happier. W.K. Kellogg, of cornflakes and masturbation fame, decreased the work day to six hours in 1930 at his factory in Battle Creek; productivity increased so much he hired 300 more people and reduced the accident rate by 41%. "The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight." Nonetheless, there has to be a limit on the gains achievable by this sort of thing? Like, you wouldn't expect a half-hour workday to be commensurately more productive (or even productive at all).

Also the example is given of Edward Heath shortening the workweek to 3 days in 1973 in the U.K. in response to government expenditures rising, inflation, and mining strikes. "On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three-day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days' electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. When the five day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%."

So there is a limit; but it's much lower than I expected. But if you gradually reduced working hours even to the point where productivity began to stagnate a little, this could have positive environmental benefits: one reason we have to worry about global warming is that our fossil fuel consumption is so high. So I dunno, even a really short work week like 3 days might not be such a bad idea, if it was approached gradually.

p. 143-144: Social benefits of less work. Apparently men who take paternity leave not only do more laundry and more housework as a result, but the effect is permanent even after they return to work. An unusual solution to a gender imbalance in unpaid labor, perhaps.

p. 150: For people who worry that lots of leisure time will make people lazy, there's a good Bertrand Russel quote here about how one reason people seem lazy these days when they're not working is because work takes up all their energy: i.e., if you work eight hours a day at a stressful job, maybe all you have the energy to do when you get home is play video games or watch TV. If you want people to do more and more interesting things with their lives, have them work less.

p. 154-155: Another way of looking at Graeber's "bullshit jobs" is as jobs which don't create wealth, but merely move it around.

p. 158-159: Fascinating historical case of a bank strike in Ireland in 1970. "Overnight, 85% of the country's reserves were locked down. ... businesses across Ireland began to hoard cash. ... At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill."

Spoiler alert: not much happened. The economy continued to grow; the expected paralysis from lack of available money did not appear. Contrast this against the strike by a group more useful to society (garbagemen in NYC) which paralyzes the city in less than a week, this strike lasted six months, and was entirely uneventful.

"After the bank closures, they continued writing checks to one another as usual, the only difference being they could no longer be cashed at a bank. Instead, that other dealer in liquid assets - the Irish pub - stepped in to fill the void. ... 'The managers of these retail outlets and public houses had a high degree of information about their customers,' explains the economist Antoin Murphy. 'One does not after all serve drink to someone for years without discovering something of his liquid resources.'"

Basically, a new, decentralized monetary system appeared overnight, built on the country's 11,000 pubs. The thing that served to help create paper money in Europe in the first place--personal promissory notes and informal networks of trust--served well enough during the strike to maintain the essential institution of paper money, and while it limited the availability of large loans for things like construction projects, it did rather undercut the claim that the financial sector performs some kind of utterly indespensible service the economy can't do without.

p. 161-162: In other words, just because something is difficult and concentrates wealth as a result (finance, say), doesn't mean it's necessarily valuable to the economy as a whole, or that it's creating wealth itself.

p. 165-6: Explicit invocation of Graeber's bullshit jobs. Look, I'm not entirely satisfied with Graeber's notion of the bullshit job; I'd like a more formal examination of how the economy could produce whole industries which are somehow superfluous to its operation. But it's striking how consistently people are willing to declare that, yeah, their own job is essentially bullshit, and thinking about how much genius and skill and knowledge is being soaked up by sections of the economy we could probably do without, and which could be applied to more important problems of human flourishing (like eradicating disease or ending poverty) is kinda terrifying.

p. 169: Bregman's contention is that badly-constructed policy seems to drive the creation of bullshit jobs, like taxing the wrong thing. "A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country's brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a live devoted to research over banking, twenty years later the balance had flipped.... The upshot is that we've all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elswhere in the economic chain." A financial transaction tax, Bregman argues, would get people doing work that's more useful (would create more wealth).

p. 169-171: Bregman touches briefly on one of my pet peeves, in education. The trend of education being tailored to what jobs are in demand (banking, accounting, middle management) and in general treating education like job training, either in the tulip bulbs sense or in a more direct practical sense like the editorial pages of the Economist tend to do, have the tail wagging the dog: education is a means to shape society in positive ways, and we shouldn't necessarily be training people to be accountants unless we think our society is poorer for having fewer accountants. The rule of law, Bregman notes, is not seventeen times more effective in the U.S. than it is in Japan, even though the U.S. has seventeen times the number of lawyers Japan does per capita.

p. 173: Nice coda to his NYC garbage collector strike story: people *really* want to be garbage collectors in NYC these days, because it pays well, even though the hours are long and the work is hard.

p. 195: "Of course, the laborer William Leadbeater may have been exaggerating slightly when he predicted that machines would be 'the destruction of the universe,' but the Luddites' concerns were far from unfounded. Their wages were plummeting and their jobs were disappearing like dust in the wind. 'How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?' wondered the late eighteenth century clothworkers of Leeds. 'Some say, Begin and learn some other business. Suppose we do; who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task; and when we have learned it, how do we know we shall be any better for all our pains; for... another machine may arise, which may take away that business also.'" But teach coal miners Java!

p. 200: Bregman doesn't say it, but the impression I get from this book is that we solve a lot of these problems *now*, when maybe--just maybe--they're tractable, or we suffer a lot as things get worse for the next 50 years and end up having a much more chaotic and terrible time trying to fix things once they've broken down beyond our ability to maintain the status quo.

p. 210: On whether it's better to give away mosquito nets or sell them cheaply. Seems to be better to give them away; people used the nets regardless, and even people given nets for free would later buy them if they had the opportunity, i.e., people get used to having nets, not to getting handouts.

p. 215: On the historical recentness of closed borders. Before World War 1, borders seem poised to disappear; border controls were rare, passports seen as a tool of backward countries like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and people predicted railroads would erase national distinctions. The war, and the closing of borders to prevent spies crossing them, seems to have put the kibosh on that.

p. 216: Let's say you lifted all trade barriers in the world; the productive gains from doing so would be approximately one thousandth that of general open borders. That is a hard number to argue against.

p. 221 ff.: A list of pro-open-borders arguments. Standard fare here: notable stuff includes a discussion of criminality among migrants. It's been noted in some countries, like the Netherlands, immigrants have higher crime rates than the native population, in contrast to countries like the U.S. and the U.K, where the crime rates are lower. "For a long time, research into this question was put off by the dictates of political correctness. But in 2004, the first extended study exploring the connection between ethnicity and youth crime got underway in Rotterdam. Ten years later, the results were in. The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. ... Youth crime, the report stated, had its origins in the neighborhood where the kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities."

Bregman also argues that, contra Robert Putnam, immigrants don't undermine social cohesion. "Putnam's findings were debunked... . A later retrospective analysis of ninety studies found no correlation whatsoever between diversity and social cohesion." Putnam apparently didn't take into account that African Americans and Latinos report less social cohesion no matter where they live, and controlling for this undermines Putnam's results. Poor communities have less social cohesion, yes, but it's not attributable to the presence of minorities or immigrants.

Another good points is that more open borers promote immigrants' return: when the U.S. patrolled its southern border less strictly, ca. 85% of illegal immigrants who crossed it eventually went back. Seems kind of obvious in retrospect: if you want illegal immigrants to leave... just let them?

I have this prediction that the first developed country that tries open borders is going to get a massive competitive economic advantage against the rest of the world, but I think it'll be a long time before this actually gets tested. Personally, I'm betting on the Canadians.

p. 237: Bregman is willing to discuss some of the doubts he has about his own positions, which is much more than I was expecting from a book of this type. I really, really wish more authors would do this.

p. 240: Bonus Asch Conformity discussion.

Bregman wants to know, can people actually be convinced? And how? His answer's not especially encouraging: it takes a crisis, like 2008. The problem with 2008, though, was that there wasn't a strong counter-narrative in place: there was no alternative to try. Movements like Occupy were nebulous and didn't have a clear set of goals. What was needed was a preexisting political movement or position that was placed to take advantage of people's openness to new solutions. This book is, I suppose, his attempt to spread some of these "utopian" ideas, so when the next crisis hits, they're available as solutions for people to advance. That's a modest goal for a book allegedly about utopian politics, but I don't think he's wrong; opinions change only slowly, and having a realistic view of how to go about changing opinions is important.

p. 254-255: Discussion of the Overton Window, and the left's role in nudging it around. Plus, a slogan I like: "Be realistic! Demand the impossible!"

p. 256: Discussion of leftist parties that seek to quell "radical" sentiment inside their own ranks in order to try to (so they think) remain electable. This is a pattern I see happening repeatedly: in the SPD in Germany, in Labour in the U.K., in the Democrats in the U.S., leaders like Pelosi and the bigwigs of New Labour who think that they have to go as middle-of-the-road as possible and avoid upsetting the status quo, ignoring that the strength of the left is often in expanding peoples' understanding of what society can achieve. It's depressing as hell, and it's not surprising that people are turning toward formerly obscure politicians like Corbyn and Sanders who are willing to actually try new ideas. Trouble is, Corbyn and Sanders have been minor politicians for a long time for a reason: they're charismatic as a couple of day-old fish, and they're not actually that good at uniting their parties.

p. 257-8: "'There's a kind of activism,' Rebecca Solnit remarks in her book "Hope in the Dark," 'that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results.' One thing Donald Trump understands very well is that most people prefer to be on the winning side. ... Most people resent the pity and paternalism of the Good Samaritan. Sadly, the underdog socialist has forgotten that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress. By that I don't mean a narrative that only excites a few hisptes who get their kicks philosophizing about 'post-capitalism' or 'intersectionality' after reading some long-winded tome. ... What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people."

And he's not wrong. Bregman argues for reclaiming 'the language of progress,' i.e., meeting the current (neoliberal?) worldview on its own terms and explaining how these goals fulfill its aims, rather than contest them. I'd add to that that I'd like to see a left that actually cares about asking what constitutes effective activism, what actually changes people's minds, and what actually wins election and helps shapes policy, rather than just feeling good and laughing when Richard Spencer gets punched. That second vision of the left isn't just shortsighted; it's depressing, it's small-minded, and it's vicious. It's also selfish: it's about being secure in your own identity rather than *helping people,* and the fact it claims the moral high ground in a lot of debates is just repulsive to me.

All in all, the program Bregman seems to advocate for is startlingly modest, and delightfully specific: he wants UBI, a 15-hour workweek, a financial transaction tax, and open borders; and he's willing to be as incrementialist as possible on all these points. There are some other goals around the edges--a clearer and more purposeful vision of education's role in society, for instance, and a new approach to politics--but these too don't seem to require moving heaven and earth to accomplish them. In some ways, this book disappointed me: there's nothing here that fundamentally upends social or economic relations in the developed world, and it's all pretty consistent with a vision of historical trends in progress just extrapolated a little further into the future. But Bregman writes lucidly and engagingly on these subjects, and he condenses a lot of sources into a single volume. What this book is probably ideal for is giving to your centrist or left-leaning cousin or friend, who might be sympathetic to UBI or a financial transaction tax, or someone you know who is just curious about interesting new policy proposals in general.

Bregman's program would be suitable for a center-left political party in Europe, or a movement within the Democratic Party in the U.S., especially if it was helmed by someone who could talk cannily about these ideas in the public sphere. This book is proof these ideas *aren't* actually that utopian, and *can* be talked about in a way that makes them seem plausible--we just need more people doing that.