The citation describing the experiment points to a Dutch news site (that Google annoyingly refuses to translate) that looks more like an op-ed than anything official, but more damningly, doesn’t provide any links closer to the original source.īregman’s grasp of economics is pretty tenuous. I didn’t try any harder than this to find the document. The given citation for this “unmitigated success” was to a random pdf on the Utrecht municipal website which doesn’t exist anymore.
This struck me as being exorbitantly expensive, and I wanted to check their methodologies and math. What I wanted to check was the cost breakdown Utopia describes the project as costing $217 million, and being responsible for getting 6,500 people off of the streets over nine years. I’m willing to believe this prevention is usually a better strategy than treatment. The book makes a case for “giving housing/money to homeless people is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of not” via a case study. There was another time I wanted to check a source. “The historian Brian Steesland… emphasizes that, had Nixon’s plan gone ahead, the ramifications would have been huge… No longer would there be such a thing as the ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving poor’ ”.“Ultimately, the perfect, self-regulating market proved an illusion.”.Utopia makes some other bold claims without backing them up here’s a few that bothered me enough to mark them down: There are lots of other citations in the book.
No reference to which “more recent research” reveals resounding success. But then Utopia for Realists turns around with the sentence “more recent research has revealed that the Speenhamland system was actually a success.” A description of how the original study was supposedly flawed, but no citation to back it up. I can’t make up my mind on whether this book is merely incompetent or actively dishonest.įor example, the book discusses the Speenhamland system, which it describes as an early form of GMI, and then discusses a contemporary report which described it as a failed experiment. If these are the best arguments for a GMI, well… let’s hope that they’re not the best arguments for a GMI.
What it boils down to is that Utopia for Realists isn’t very good. I hadn’t thought too much about it, besides the fact that lots of smart people I know say it’s a good idea, and that obviously we’re going to need a solution to what happens to humans after we automate away all of the jobs.Īfter reading this book, I am significantly less on-board with the idea. I must admit, I was pretty sold on a guaranteed minimum income before reading this book. Rutger Bergman’s Utopia for Realists is a book whose primary thesis is that we should have a guaranteed minimum income (GMI).
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